Are perceptual categories really conceptual?
Debi Roberson, Department of Psychology University of Essex UK The argument that language and thought are, at best, only loosely connected, has been based on evidence from the color domain suggesting that, while color terms vary widely across different cultures, the underlying cognitive representations do not. Contrary to this argument, we present a range of evidence supporting the linguistic relativity of color and other perceptual categories, such as shape and facial expression. Cross-cultural investigations in New Guinea and Africa have failed to find evidence of a set of universal color (or shape) categories. Moreover, in native English speakers, the greater accuracy normally observed for cross-category judgments compared to within-category judgments disappeared under verbal interference (both for color and facial expressions). This suggests that Categorical Perception is critically dependent on the availability of a verbal code. Finally, the loss of labels radically impaired the a
