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The aim of this paper is to explore the meanings of the Japanese perceptual verb “kiku” focusing on correlations with nouns as complements. A word does not exist alone apart from the sentence, so when we consider the meaning of vocabulary, even though relationships with other factors should be considered, little attention has been given to the point. The fact that certain perception verbs could refer to non-perception meanings has been established in many Cognitive linguistics studies such as Lakoff & Johnson(1980,1999). In Japanese, as opposed to intransitive perception verb “kikoeru”, transitive perception verb “kiku” has been considered to express the meanings of active perception. But, it was found that “kiku” which takes a noun such as ‘sound’ or ‘voice’ as a complement represents a passive and spontaneous meaning. And “kiku” which takes a noun such as ‘music’ as a complement expresses the meaning of APPRECIATION, which takes a noun representing a thought or speech act as a complement, expresses the meaning of COGNITION based on PERCEPTION. As a result of analyzing the examples, the PHYSICAL PERCEPTION, meaning of verb “kiku” is expanded to the meanings of COGNITION, INTERNAL RECEPTIVITY, OBEDIENCE etc.. This results lead to the conclusion that the meaning of words has to do with the type of complements and the syntactic features. And we also arrive at the conclusion that in the case of not only English but also Japanese, the metaphorical mappings take place between two domains of experience: the vocabulary of physical perception as the source domain and the vocabulary of the internal self and sensations as the target domain.