Most current accounts of color word acquisition propose that the delay between children's first production of color words and adult-like understanding is due to problems abstracting color as a domain of meaning. Here we present evidence against this hypothesis, and show that, from the time children produce color words in a labeling task they use…

Humans have an unparalleled ability to represent objects as members of multiple categories. A given object, such as a pillow may be--depending on current task demands--represented as an instance of something that is soft, as something that contains feathers, as something that is found in bedrooms, or something that is larger than a toaster. This…

Prior research suggests that preschoolers can generalize object properties based on category information conveyed by semantically-similar labels. However, previous research did not control for co-occurrence probability of labels in natural speech. The current studies re-assessed children's generalization with semantically-similar labels.…

The interface between the conceptual and lexical systems was investigated in a word production setting. We tested the effects of two conceptual dimensions--semantic category and visual shape--on the selection of Chinese nouns and classifiers. Participants named pictures with nouns ("rope") or classifier-noun phrases ("one-"classifier"-rope") in…

Human social, cognitive, and linguistic functioning depends on skills for rapidly processing action. Identifying distinct acts within the dynamic motion flow is one basic component of action processing; for example, skill at segmenting action is foundational to action categorization, verb learning, and comprehension of novel action sequences. Yet…

Here, we investigate how activation of mental representations of categories during analogical reasoning influences subsequent cognitive processing. Specifically, we present and test the central predictions of the "Micro-Category" account of analogy. This account emphasizes the role of categories in aligning terms for analogical mapping. In a…

Small numbers are spontaneously associated with left space and larger numbers with right space (the SNARC effect), for example when classifying numbers by parity. This effect is often attributed to reading habits but a causal link has so far never been documented. We report that bilingual Russian-Hebrew readers show a SNARC effect after reading…

In their original report [Kunde, W., Kiesel, A., & Hoffmann, J. (2003). Conscious control over the content of unconscious cognition. "Cognition," 88, 223-242] maintain that ''unconscious stimuli [do not] owe their impact [...] to automatic semantic categorization'' (p.223), and instead propose the action-trigger theory of unconscious priming. In a…

Recent research in semantics and pragmatics has revived the debate about whether there are two cognitively distinct categories of conversational implicatures: generalised and particularised. Generalised conversational implicatures are so-called because they seem to arise more or less independently of contextual support. Particularised implicatures…