Linguistic Influences in Categorization Emmanuel M Pothos1 Nick Chater2 Andrew J Stewart3 1 Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh 2 Department of Psychology, University of Warwick 3 School of Psychology, Bangor University
[email protected] There is an abundance of experimental evidence for how language affects similarity and catego- rization. But no account has been forthcoming as to how these results potentially affect formal models of categorization, that are typically insensitive to language information. In this paper we explore this issue via simple categorization tasks under different linguistic manipulation con- ditions. More specifically, we found that participants’ expectations about category structure is indeed affected by the linguistic label given to the category exemplars presented, and that such effects appear to be beyond the scope of current formal models of categorization. Are Phonological Priming Effects Fragile? The Interaction of Phono- logical and Orthographic Forms in Masked Priming Ram Frost Riki Gotesman Sarah Tayeb Merav Ahissar Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
[email protected] Most demonstrations of prelexical coding of phonology involve the backward masking paradigm. In contrast, forward masking is considered to be sensitive to orthographic form rather than to phonological structure. Using forward masked priming, we examined how phonological and or- thographic similarity interact in the recognition of target Hebrew words or nonwords. The deep Hebrew orthography allows simple manipulations in which the orthographic structure is kept constant while phonological dissimilarity gradually increases, and vice-versa. We measured the impact of phonological and orthographic similarity in various contrast/luminance conditions. Our results showed an identical linear effect of letter or phoneme alterations.