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How Language Shapes Thought: Classifiers Structure and Align Concepts
Poster Session D, Thursday, October 1, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
Qingqing Qu1, Xiaoxuan Kang2, Ying Li; 1Chinese Academy of Sciences
Do different languages shape speakers’ conceptual representations? Here, we investigate whether and how grammatical categories influence the representation and organization of conceptual knowledge. Unlike English, which lacks grammatical classifiers, Chinese requires morphemes that categorize objects by perceptual or functional features. To examine whether the classifier system shapes Chinese speakers’ conceptual representations and to elucidate the underlying mechanisms, we compared Chinese and English speakers across three tasks: similarity judgment (Experiment 1), forced-choice categorization (Experiment 2), and spatial arrangement (Experiment 3). Chinese speakers judged items sharing a classifier as more similar than English speakers did, suggesting that classifiers shape conceptual representations. This enhanced classifier-based similarity effect in Chinese speakers was further explained by visual and functional similarity and by linguistic co-occurrence statistics between concepts (Experiments 4 and 5). Representational similarity analysis on brain activity measured by event-related potentials (ERPs) investigated the temporal dynamics of classifier effects during real-time processing (Experiment 6). Using the semantic relatedness task, we observed a dissociation between classifier and semantic effects in the time course of processing: classifier information was activated at an earlier processing stage, whereas semantic information exerted its influence during a later stage. Together, these findings indicate that experience with a classifier system shapes conceptual representations by highlighting classifier-relevant sensory features and internalizing linguistic co-occurrence statistics.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism,