Three experiments provide evidence that the conceptualization of moving objects and events is influenced by one's native language, consistent with linguistic relativity theory. Monolingual English speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in an English-speaking context performed better than monolingual Spanish speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in a Spanish-speaking context at sorting novel, animated objects and events into categories on the basis of manner of motion, an attribute that is prominently marked in English but not in Spanish. In contrast, English and Spanish speakers performed similarly at classifying on the basis of path, an attribute that is prominently marked in both languages. Similar results were obtained regardless of whether categories were labeled by novel words or numbered, suggesting that an English-speaking tendency to focus on manner of motion is a general phenomenon and not limited to word learning. Effects of age of acquisition of English were also observed on the performance of bilinguals, with early bilinguals performing similarly in the 2 language contexts and later bilinguals showing greater contextual variation.

Three experiments provided evidence that 3.5- to 4-year-old English-speaking children (N = 72) attend to the appearances of novel objects, not only when they hear a novel noun, but also when they hear a novel verb. Children learning nouns in the context of novel, moving objects attended exclusively to the appearances of objects, even though nouns were also related to the motions of those objects. Children learning verbs attended equally to the appearances of objects and their motions. The latter result contrasted with the results from adults (N = 20), who focused more strongly on motions than on the appearances of objects when learning verbs. When familiar objects were instead employed, child verb learners attended more to motions than to the appearances of objects. Children may attend to novel objects during verb learning because knowledge of an object may be prerequisite to understanding what a verb means in the context of that object.

This study examines the association of nouns and verbs with 2 different kinds of motion. Extrinsic motion is the motion of 1 object with respect to another object, whereas intrinsic motion is the motion of an object (or its parts) defined with respect to itself. Several experiments are reported that compare the association of these types of motion with novel nouns and verbs. Adult participants demonstrated a bias to associate verbs with extrinsic motion to a greater extent than intrinsic motion and a bias to associate nouns with intrinsic motion to a greater extent than extrinsic motion. These results suggest a division of labor between nouns and verbs, with verbs specialized to convey relational information, whereas nouns are specialized to convey information about individual objects. The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motion may be related to the neuroanatomical distinction between the "what" and "where" systems.

Whenever people think of an object as something (e.g. that Fido is a dog, a pet, or loyal), they are categorizing it using their internal concepts. A concept is a mental representation that allows different things to be treated equivalently for some purpose. People learn concepts to facilitate communication, to make useful predictions about their world, to create mental building blocks for expressing more sophisticated thoughts, and to form efficient representations for objects and situations. We discuss five approaches to how concepts are learned and represented: rules, prototypes, exemplars, category boundaries, and theories. Whereas some of these approaches leave the impression that concepts are isolated mental structures, connections between concepts are also critically important. We discuss connections between concepts and perception that link categorization to object recognition and serve to ground concepts in the world. Consistent with this connection, concepts and perceptual processes mutually influence one another. We also describe connections between concepts and language that allow concepts to subserve abstract communication, and for language needs to reciprocally affect concepts. Finally, we predict future directions for concept learning research, including formal computational modeling and educational applications.

No abstract

A componential analysis was conducted to determine the locus of adult age differences in symbol arithmetic. Measures of the duration of two proposed components, substitution of digits for symbols and the addition or subtraction of the digits resulting from these substitutions, were obtained from 52 young adults and 52 older adults. Tests of working memory, perceptual speed, motor speed, and associative learning were also administered to all subjects. The results were most consistent with an interpretation postulating that the speed of many different cognitive processes decreases with increased age. Considerable age-related variance remained in the measures of symbol arithmetic performance after statistical control of working memory and associative learning performance, casting doubt on alternative hypotheses of the source of age-related differences in this task.

No abstract

No abstract