Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We distinguish two forms of categorization: recognizing objects and choosing a name for them. Understanding the relation between similarity -- which we take to underlie recognition -- and naming is therefore fundamental. Two sources of complexity in naming are described that distinguish recognition from naming. We distinguish the taslcs empirically by comparing linguistic category boundaries and perceived similarity for speakers of Chinese and English for sixty common containers. Although the two groups have different linguistic catgegory boundaries, their similarity judgments are largely convergent.