Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The purpose of this paper can be viewed from two different but related perspectives. First, it investigates the role of language in concept learning. Second it investigates this by asking how event categories are acquired. From the first perspective, our experiment showed that syntactic Whorfian biases in human categorization actually exist. The new methodology employed provides us with a tool to study in more detail the nature of those biases. The Whorfian hypothesis does not necessarily have to be tested cross-culturally. It can successfully be taken into the lab with subjects belonging to the same linguistic community. From the second perspective, our experiment showed that the addition of verbal descriptors to a set of animation scenes in some systematic way facilitates learning of the regularities in the scenes. This result is a new piece of evidence supporting the focused sampling theory of category acquisition.