Sex and Seniority: The Effects of Linguistic Categories on Conceptual Judgments and Memory

The current study explored the effects of different semantic categories in kinship terms on similarity judgments, word extensions, and recognition memory. We compared Indonesian – in which sibling terms are based on relative age – with English – in which sibling terms are based on gender. In Experiment 1, participants saw triads of pictures of scenes involving kinship relations and were asked to make similarity judgments and to extend novel labels from the standards to the variants. The variants each resembled the standard along one dimension and differed along the other. In Experiment 2, other participants were asked to remember the standard pictures and were later tested on their recognition memory using the variants. Results from both experiments converged to suggest that participants’ judgments, word extensions, and memory were influenced by their semantic categories.