Although the senses provide a common basis for our experience of the world, cross-linguistic research has revealed substantial diversity across languages in how perceptual experiences are encoded in words. Such variability is also present at the level of grammatical structure, though the project of charting the parameters and limits of cross-linguistic diversity at this level is still in its relative infancy. We contribute to this goal by presenting a comparative study of the grammar of perception in two understudied and endangered languages, Guambiano (a Barbacoan language spoken in southern Colombia), and Duna (a Duna-Bogaia language of the Papua New Guinean highlands). Our study is based on primary fieldwork and draws on spoken language data collected using the Grammar of Perception Questionnaire. We document the lexical and constructional resources available in the two languages for describing events of perception and examine how sensory meanings are packaged and distributed across different elements of these constructions. The results reveal previously undocumented patterns of perception event encoding, underscoring the multifaceted and complex relationship between language and perception.
This paper argues that fungal mycelial networks exhibit minimal cognition through memory-integrated adaptive regulation. Drawing on cybernetic and enactivist frameworks, I develop a non-representational account of memory as the organism's capacity to modulate behavior based on temporally extended environmental coupling. I propose four operational criteria for minimal cognition: feedback-guided regulation of behavior, maintenance of internal viability conditions, structural modulation based on past environmental interactions, and plasticity across time scales that supports anticipatory adaptivity. Empirical evidence demonstrates that fungi meet all four criteria through distributed memory mechanisms: fungal networks exhibit directional regrowth toward previously encountered resources even after spatial displacement, stress priming persists across multiple cell divisions, Spitzenkörper-mediated directional persistence in constrained environments, and transgenerational memory through spore imprinting. These findings challenge representationalist assumptions in cognitive science by showing that memory and cognition can emerge from morphodynamic, biochemical, and electrophysiological processes without necessary neural substrates or symbolic representations. Fungal cognition demonstrates that the organizational principles underlying cognition-feedback-driven adaptation, norm-preservation, and historical coupling-can be realized in radically different material substrates, expanding our understanding of what counts as a cognitive system.
Color's ultimate physical reality is continuous, and yet human beings "cut" this continuum into a rather small number of categories reflected in their languages' color lexicon. There are striking cross-linguistic differences in the color lexicon, which are primarily attributed to differences in communicative needs, but also striking commonalities, attributed to a common human perceptual system. Here, we challenge this notion of a uniform perceptual structure by experimentally comparing participants from two populations, French from France and Himba from Namibia. They differ in the amount of exposure to ultraviolet radiation, which influences color perception through its effects on eye physiology cumulatively during the individual's lifetime. We found, even after controlling for potential confounds at the individual, color-naming, and cultural levels, that color perception is affected by age significantly more in the Himba participants, suggesting that besides communicative needs, perceptual structure can play a dual role, contributing to both cross-linguistic universals and differences in the color lexicon.
