This paper presents a cognitive approach of the processes of nomination operating within different modes of questioning and reporting the sonic experience of French speakers in three corpora. After exploring the resources of French language to refer to noise and sounds through elicitation of lists of words, we explored their use in describing environmental noise and qualifying musical sounds by different groups of subjects. We propose to unify the different linguistic approaches of referring (nomination, denomination, designation) not only as resulting in different linguistic processes but as relating linguistic resources to cognitive categories and processes in constructing through a large diversity of linguistic devices experiential knowledge as well as scientific normative knowledge accounted through terminology.