A cross-cultural study of language and cognition: Numeral classifiers and solid object categorization.

One of the central issues in cognition is identifying universal and culturally specific patterns of thought. In this study, we examined how one aspect of culture, a linguistic part of speech known asclassifiers, are related to categorization of solid objects. In Experiment 1, we used a numeral classifier elicitation task to examine the classifiers used by speakers of Hmong, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese (N = 34) with 135 nouns that referred to solid objects. In Experiment 2, adult speakers of English, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Hmong (N = 64) rated the similarity of 39 pictured objects that depicted a subset of the nouns. All groups classified the objects into natural kinds and artifacts, with the category of humans anchoring both divisions. The main difference that emerged from the study was that speakers of Japanese and English rated humans and animals as more similar to each other than Hmong speakers; Mandarin speakers' ratings of the similarity between humans and animals fell in between those of Hmong and English speakers. However, the pattern of categorization of humans and animals found among speakers of the classifier languages contradicted their patterns of classifier use. The findings help to tease apart the effects of language from other cultural factors that impact cognition.

Perceptual alignment contributes to referential transparency in indirect learning.

Young children can sometimes acquire new word meanings-even for property terms-through incidental learning (e.g. Carey & Bartlett, 1978). We propose that an important support for this process is spontaneous perceptual comparison processes that lead children to notice key commonalities and differences. Specifically, we hypothesize that when the target property appears as a difference between two highly similar and alignable objects, spontaneous comparison processes operate to highlight the property. The property may then be linked to an accompanying word, even if the child has no prior intention to learn the word. To test this, we revisited the Carey and Bartlett paradigm, varying the perceptual alignability of the objects that 3- and 4-year-olds saw while hearing a novel color word, chromium. In Experiments 1 and 2, children in the High Alignment condition were able to identify chromium objects in a subsequent task, whereas those in the Low Alignment condition were not. Experiment 3 showed that direct instructions to learn the word led to a different pattern of results. Experiment 4 showed that the incidental learning persisted over delay and transferred to new objects. We conclude that perceptual alignment contributes to referential transparency and to incidental learning of word meanings. Implications for hypothesis-testing theories of word learning are discussed.