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The Sensorimotor Norms for the Chinese Classifiers

Summary

Sensorimotor norms already exist for Mandarin nouns, adjectives and verbs. Numeral classifiers, a grammatical category that sorts nouns by properties such as shape, size or manipulability, had not been covered. The authors build the first large-scale sensorimotor database for Chinese classifiers. They compiled 357 classifiers from Xiandai Hanyu Cidian, Hanyu Liangci Xiangjie yu Suyuan Cidian and the CCL Corpus, then had linguistics students verify the list. Native Mandarin speakers rated each classifier on a 0–5 scale across 11 dimensions: six perceptual (vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, interoception) and five action effectors (foot/leg, hand/arm, mouth/throat, head, torso). Ratings were collected via online questionnaires that followed earlier Chinese norming designs. The resulting per-classifier profiles map systematically onto classifier meanings. The authors read this as evidence that classifiers carry embodied perceptual and motor content and are not merely syntactic markers. The resource is intended to support psycholinguistic, neurocognitive and computational work on Chinese semantics and the debate over how classifiers are selected.

Key points

  • The database covers 357 classifiers. It includes verbal classifiers and archaic or idiom-bound items, but excludes measurement units (e.g., 毫升) and transliterations (e.g., 打 'dozen').
  • 523 university-level participants were recruited. The final norms draw on ratings from 288 native speakers, and screening questions on orthography, radicals and word meaning checked language competence.
  • Classifiers were split into 24 lists of 14–15 items, and each participant rated only one list to reduce fatigue. Questionnaires were hosted on the Tencent platform (wj.qq.com).
  • The 11-dimension framework builds on the Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms tradition and on prior Mandarin norming work by Chen and colleagues (2019) and by Zhong and colleagues (2022).
  • Reported analyses cover strength distributions per dimension, the dominant modality of each classifier, and modality exclusivity. The authors hypothesised that vision and hand/arm would be the most prominent dimensions.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/2ub8kenhmi8d

@inproceedings{shao2026sensorimotor,
  title = {{The Sensorimotor Norms for the Chinese Classifiers}},
  author = {Shao, Yimei and Hsu, Yu-Yin and Huang, Chu-Ren},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/2ub8kenhmi8d},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2ub8kenhmi8d}
}

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