Everybody Likes to Sleep: A Computer-Assisted Comparison of Object Naming Data from 30 Languages

TL;DR

This study introduces a transparent, multilingual, computer-assisted method to compare object naming datasets across 30 languages, facilitating cross-linguistic research and understanding of cognitive and linguistic patterns.

Contribution

It links diverse object naming datasets to unified concepts, enabling systematic comparison and analysis across multiple languages and linguistic families.

Findings

Identified recurring concepts across datasets

Compared conceptual spaces with basic vocabulary lists

Provided a framework for future cross-linguistic object naming studies

Abstract

Object naming - the act of identifying an object with a word or a phrase - is a fundamental skill in interpersonal communication, relevant to many disciplines, such as psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, or language and vision research. Object naming datasets, which consist of concept lists with picture pairings, are used to gain insights into how humans access and select names for objects in their surroundings and to study the cognitive processes involved in converting visual stimuli into semantic concepts. Unfortunately, object naming datasets often lack transparency and have a highly idiosyncratic structure. Our study tries to make current object naming data transparent and comparable by using a multilingual, computer-assisted approach that links individual items of object naming lists to unified concepts. Our current sample links 17 object naming datasets that cover 30 languages from 10 different language families. We illustrate how the comparative dataset can be explored by searching for concepts that recur across the majority of datasets and comparing the conceptual spaces of covered object naming datasets with classical basic vocabulary lists from historical linguistics and linguistic typology. Our findings can serve as a basis for enhancing cross-linguistic object naming research and as a guideline for future studies dealing with object naming tasks.