Do Classifier Categories Structure our Concepts?

Whether and to what extent our conceptual structure is universal is of great importance for our understanding of the nature of human concepts. Two major factors that might affect our concepts are language and culture. In this research, we tested whether these two factors affect our concepts of everyday objects in any significant ways. For this purpose we compare adults of three cultural/language groups—Chinese, Japanese, and German—on similarity judgment and property induction. In particular, we tested whether classifier categories influence the conceptual structure of speakers of classifier languages. Some classifier effect was found, but only for Chinese speakers in similarity judgment. Our overall results indicate that the global structure of our concepts is similar across different culture/language groups.