Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Anthropologists and psychologists have long studied how liv-ing kinds are organized into categories, and a recurring themeconcerns the relationship between folk categories and thestructure of the environment. We ask whether the frequencyand physical size of a species affect how it is classified, andaddress this question by linking frequency data from eBird (anonline database of bird observations) with an existing taxon-omy of Zapotec bird names. A first set of analyses exploreswhether frequency and size predict whether a bird is namedand how many other birds it is grouped with. A second setexplores whether frequency and size predict the word formsused as category labels. We find some evidence that frequencyaffects both category extensions and naming, but the resultshint that frequency may be dominated by other factors such asperceptual similarity.