The Sensorimotor Norms for the Chinese Classifiers

Abstract

Sensorimotor information plays a crucial role in the conceptual representation of linguistic knowledge. While previous studies have established sensorimotor norms for nouns and adjectives, little is known about how Chinese numeral classifiers encode perceptual and action-based experiences. The present study constructs the first large-scale sensorimotor norms for Chinese classifiers, collecting perceptual and action ratings for 357 classifiers from 288 native Chinese speakers. Participants evaluated each classifier along six perceptual modalities (vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, and interoception) and five action effectors (foot/leg, hand/arm, mouth/throat, head, and torso). The resulting dataset provides detailed sensorimotor profiles for each classifier and reveals systematic mappings between classifier semantics and embodied dimensions. The findings demonstrate that Chinese classifiers are not purely syntactic markers but encode distinct sensorimotor features grounded in perceptual and motor systems, highlighting the embodied foundation of the classifier system and offering valuable resources for future psycholinguistic and computational modelling studies of Chinese semantics.

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