Knowing versus Naming: Similarity and the Linguistic Categorization of Artifacts

Conversation and convention: Enduring influences on name choice for common objects

“…Therefore, an additional prediction is that shifts in name use and preference will not be paralleled in typicality or similarity ratings, which require evaluation and comparison of properties of objects other than just their names. This finding would be consistent with our previous observation of a shared perceived similarity of objects by speakers of languages that have different naming patterns for them (Malt et al, 1999) and would demonstrate how such dissociations of naming and conceptualization may come about.…”

“…Views of categorization as applied to the problem of object naming have focused on these sources of constraint (e.g., Bloom, 1996;Keil, 1989;Kemler Nelson, 1999;Rips, 1989). We have argued, though, that name choice is not fully determined by knowledge or beliefs about the object per se; it is also sensitive to influences such as a language's history and the particular history of a speaker and addressee (Malt, Sloman, & Gennari, 2003a, 2003bMalt, Sloman, Gennari, Shi, & Wang, 1999). The name a person uses for an entity is influenced by the set of names his or her language makes available for that domain and the pattern of naming that the language has evolved for objects in that domain, as well as by the goals of the particular communication and other aspects of the common ground of the speaker and addressee.…”

“…Evidence for longer term historical influences on naming choices was provided by Malt et al (1999), who found that naming patterns for a set of 60 common artifacts in the same neutral context diverged substantially for speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese. For instance, the 16 objects called bottle in English were distributed across seven different linguistic categories in Spanish.…”

Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis

“…Malt et al (1999), Kronenfeld, Armstrong and Wilmoth (1985) and Malt and Sloman (in press) found that, for artifact categories, judgments of the similarity of objects did not differ between speakers of languages who partitioned the objects into different name categories. It thus appears that perceptual categories (e.g., color) are differently susceptible to the influence of language than artifact categories.…”

“…Differences between languages in grammatical structure and range of terminology have been associated with altered perceived similarity between objects and actions, as well as to different memories of the same experience in the following domains: number systems (Gumperz & Levinson, 1997); spatial relations (Levinson, 1996;Bowerman & Choi, 2001), artifact categories (Malt & Johnson, 1998); modes of motion (Gennari, et al, 2000); time (Boroditsky, 2001); material and shape classification (Lucy, 1992); shape (Roberson, Davidoff & Shapiro, 2002) and grammatical gender (Clarke et al, 1981(Clarke et al, , 1984Sera, Berge & Pintado, 1994;Sera et al, 2001, Boroditsky, in press). Other studies have argued against the influence of linguistic differences on perceptual classification, both at the level of terminology (Munnich & Landau, 2003;Malt et al, 1999) and grammatical structure (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; Color categories 4 Pérez-Pereira, 1991). The present study seeks to shed light on whether language and cognition are coupled or separable in the domain of color categorization and perception.…”