{"pk":26444,"title":"Do classifier categories affect or reflect object concepts?","subtitle":null,"abstract":"We conceptualize objects based on sensorimotor information\ngleaned from real-world experience. To what extent is\nconceptual information structured according to higher-level\nlinguistic features? We investigate whether classifiers, a\ngrammatical category, shape the conceptual representations of\nobjects. In three experiments native Mandarin speakers (a\nclassifier language) and native Dutch speakers (a language\nwithout classifiers) judged the similarity of a target object with\nfour objects (presented as words or pictures). One object shared a\nclassifier with the target, the other objects did not. Overall, the\ntarget object was judged as more similar to the object with the\nshared classifier than distractor objects in both Dutch and\nMandarin speakers, with no difference between the two\nlanguages. Thus, even speakers of a non-classifier language are\nsensitive to object similarities underlying classifier systems, and\nusing a classifier system does not exaggerate these similarities.\nThis suggests that classifier systems reflect, rather than affect,\nconceptual structure.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"classifiers; object concepts; Mandarin; Dutch;\nlinguistic relativity; language and thought"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hb3z99f","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Laura","middle_name":"J.","last_name":"Speed","name_suffix":"","institution":"Radboud University","department":""},{"first_name":"Jidong","middle_name":"","last_name":"Chen","name_suffix":"","institution":"California State University, Fresno","department":""},{"first_name":"Falk","middle_name":"","last_name":"Huettig","name_suffix":"","institution":"Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics","department":""},{"first_name":"Asifa","middle_name":"","last_name":"Majid","name_suffix":"","institution":"Radboud University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-02T02:00:00+08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26444/galley/16080/download/"}]}