Two studies examined how lexical information contained in
words affects people’s category representations. Some words
are lexically suggestive regarding the taxonomic position of
their referent (e.g., bumblebee, starfish). However, this
information differs from language to language (e.g., in Dutch
the equivalent words hold no taxonomic information:
hommel, vlinder). Three language groups, Dutch, English, and
Indonesian speakers, were tested in similarity and typicality
judgment tasks. The results show that the lexical information
affects only the users of the language (e.g., Dutch speakers
rated Dutch-informative items, both in similarity and
typicality tasks, higher than English and Indonesian speakers).
Results are discussed in light of theories of concept
representation and the language relativity hypothesis.status: publishe
