People around the world differ in how they partition their sensory experience and package it into words, indicating that local factors such as culture, society, environment, and language itself play a significant role in shaping sensory meaning. What is their role exactly and how do they interact with universal pressures stemming from our shared biology and cognition? My work addresses these questions through detailed case studies among the hunter-gatherer Maniq of Southern Thailand and through various comparative team projects with global cross-cultural samples of small-scale and industrialized communities. My primary interests within perception is on olfaction, vision (verbs of visual perception, color vocabulary), and cross-modal correspondences between senses.
PUBLICATIONS
Wnuk, Ewelina, Annemarie Verkerk, Stephen C. Levinson, and Asifa Majid. 2022. Color technology is not necessary for rich and efficient color language. Cognition, 229: 105223.
Wnuk, Ewelina. 2022. Ways of looking: Lexicalizing visual paths in verbs. Journal of Linguistics, 58 (1), 157-202.
Arshamian, Artin, Richard C. Gerkin, Nicole Kruspe, Ewelina Wnuk, Simeon Floyd, Carolyn O'Meara, Gabriela Garrido Rodriguez, Johan N. Lundström, Joel D. Mainland, and Asifa Majid. 2022. The perception of odor pleasantness is shared across cultures. Current Biology, 32 (9): 2061-2066.e3.
Speed Laura, Hannah Atkinson, Ewelina Wnuk, and Asifa Majid. 2021. The sound of smell: Communicating odor valence with disgust sounds. Cognitive Science 45 (5): e12980.
Wnuk, Ewelina, Rujiwan Laophairoj, and Asifa Majid. 2020. Smell terms are not rara: A semantic investigation of odor vocabulary in Thai. Linguistics 58 (4): 937–66.
Wnuk, Ewelina, De Valk, Josje M, John L. A. Huisman, and Asifa Majid. 2017. Hot and cold smells: Odor temperature associations across cultures. Frontiers in Psychology 8: 1373.
De Valk, Josje M., Ewelina Wnuk, John L. A. Huisman, and Asifa Majid. 2017. Odor–color associations differ with verbal descriptors for odors: A comparison of three linguistically diverse groups. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 24 (4): 1171–79.
Wnuk, Ewelina. 2016. Semantic specificity of perception verbs in Maniq. Nijmegen: Radboud University dissertation.
Wnuk, Ewelina, and Asifa Majid. 2014. Revisiting the limits of language: The odor lexicon of Maniq. Cognition 131 (1): 125–38.