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Related Concept Videos

Language and Cognition01:27

Language and Cognition

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Language serves as a bridge between ideas and communication, influencing how individuals perceive and interact with the world. Psychologists have long debated whether language shapes thought or vice versa. This discussion gained grip with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, who proposed that language determines thought, a concept known as linguistic determinism. They suggested that the vocabulary and structure of a language influence how its speakers think and perceive reality.
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In psychology, concepts can be divided into two categories: natural and artificial. Natural concepts are formed through direct or indirect experiences. For example, consider the concept of snow. If you live in a place with regular snowfall, such as Essex Junction, Vermont, you know snow through direct experiences. You’ve seen it fall, touched it, shoveled it, and played in it. You recognize its texture, appearance, and even its smell. In contrast, if you live on an island like Saint...
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How Data are Classified: Categorical Data01:11

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A variable, usually notated by capital letters such as X and Y, is a characteristic or measurement that can be determined for each member of a population. Data are the actual values of variables. They may be numbers, or they may be words. Datum is a single value.
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Language, whether spoken, signed, or written, consists of specific components: lexicon and grammar. The lexicon is the vocabulary of a language, comprising its words. Grammar is the set of rules used to convey meaning through the lexicon. For example, English grammar adds “-ed” to most verbs to indicate past tense. Words are formed by combining phonemes, which are the basic sound units of a language. Different languages have different sets of phonemes (e.g., “ah” vs.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 19, 2025

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms
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Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

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The language network is not engaged in object categorization.

Yael Benn1, Anna A Ivanova2,3, Oliver Clark1

  • 1Department of Psychology, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester M15 6BH, United Kingdom.

Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
|August 9, 2023
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Language does not impact object categorization. Selective impairment in low-dimensional categorization may stem from cognitive control deficits, not language processing issues, in individuals with aphasia.

Keywords:
aphasiacategorizationfMRIlanguage

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Neuroscience

Background:

  • The relationship between language and thought, specifically language's role in object categorization, is a long-standing debate.
  • A prominent hypothesis suggests language labels facilitate categorization by reducing interference from irrelevant features, particularly for low-dimensional categories.
  • Consequently, language impairment was predicted to disproportionately affect low-dimensional categorization compared to high-dimensional categorization.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the causal role of the language system in object categorization.
  • To determine if language impairment selectively affects low-dimensional categorization.
  • To explore the neural correlates of low- and high-dimensional categorization.

Main Methods:

  • Two behavioral studies involving individuals with aphasia.
  • An fMRI experiment with healthy adult participants.
  • Assessment of categorization abilities for low-dimensional (e.g., "Yellow Things") and high-dimensional (e.g., "Animals") stimuli.

Main Results:

  • Selective low-dimensional categorization impairment was observed in some, but not all, individuals with severe anomia, and was not a general characteristic of aphasia.
  • fMRI data showed minimal activation in language-responsive regions during both categorization tasks.
  • Categorization primarily engaged the domain-general multiple-demand network, crucial for various cognitive tasks.

Conclusions:

  • The language system is not directly implicated in object categorization.
  • Selective low-dimensional categorization impairment may be linked to damage in cognitive control brain regions rather than language processing areas.
  • This research supports a dissociation between the language system and many cognitive functions.