Language and perceptual categorisation

In a pioneering set of experiments, Rosch investigated the colour processing of a remote traditional culture. It was concluded that colours form universally natural and salient categories. However, our own cross-cultural research, backed up by neuropsychological data and interference studies, indicates that perceptual categories are derived from the words in the speaker's language. The new data support a rather strong version of the Whorfian view that perceptual categories are organized by the linguistic systems of our mind

Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis

The question of whether language affects our categorization of perceptual continua is of particular interest for the domain of color where constraints on categorization have been proposed both within the visual system and in the visual environment. Recent research (Roberson, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000; Roberson et al., in press) found substantial evidence of cognitive color differences between different language communities, but concerns remained as to how representative might be a tiny, extremely remote community. The present study replicates and extends previous findings using additional paradigms among a larger community in a different visual environment. Adult semi-nomadic tribesmen in Southern Africa carried out similarity judgments, short-term memory and long-term learning tasks. They showed different cognitive organization of color to both English and another language with the five color terms. Moreover, Categorical Perception effects were found to differ even between languages with broadly similar color categories. The results provide further evidence of the tight relationship between language and cognition

A perceptual learning approach to the Whorfian hypothesis:supervised classification of motion

Recent research on the relationship between grammatical aspect and motion event cognition has shown that speakers of nonaspect languages (e.g., German, Swedish) attend to event endpoints more than speakers of aspect languages (e.g., English, Spanish). In this study, we took a perceptual learning approach to the Whorfian hypothesis, training native English speakers to categorize events either in an English-like way (same-language bias) or in a Swedish-like way (other-language bias), with and without verbal interference in English. Results showed that successful learning occurred in both language conditions. However, verbal interference disrupted learning only in the condition where the perceptual dimension to be learned was also salient in the participant's native language. This revealed selective language influence depending on the associative or dissociative relationship between the linguistic features occurring in the observer's native language and the perceptual features of the stimuli presented to them