Classification of Non-linguistic Sounds According to Their Names in a Natural Language

One of the most prominent topics in psycholinguistics is naming, or the study of how various inputs from our vision, our taste, our sense of smell are grouped and categorized in a language. While hearing is the second most important sense for humans after vision, the number of research on special abstract vocabulary for sound, or noise, classification is relatively small; most of psycholinguistic research on how people name something refers to the sphere of taste, less commonly to smell. Humans are fairly good at determining the the source of a sound, therefore we can name objects that produce sounds and be aware of danger, if that is the case. However, in some situations the source can simply not be determined. This should have prompted the emergence of special abstract vocabulary for denoting sounds according to how they sound. On the other hand, several papers and non-academic publications are dedicated to classification of sound data, namely, hot to determine the genre of a song or recognise the source of a certain sound. The problem is, their data have nothing to do with actual words; it is more like object classification. Whereas in my thesis I am going to build a model that would describe extralinguistic sounds using abstract vocabulary for sound - just like a human would do.