Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The relationship between linguistic and nonlinguistic spatial categories has been characterized in terms of two contrastingpositions. One position suggests, naturally enough, a close correspondence between the two sets of categories. A secondposition suggests a dissociation, in which the boundaries between nonlinguistic categories function as the prototypes forlinguistic categories. The latter account predicts categorical perception (CP)enhanced discrimination at category bound-ariesat the horizontal and vertical axes, yet this prediction has not been tested directly. We tested it in three experiments.In perceptual and memory tasks, cross-axis locations were discriminated better than within-axis locations at both axes,indicating CP. These results suggest that the axes indeed serve as nonlinguistic category boundaries, consistent with thedissociation account. However, findings from a supplemental naming task revealed that these boundaries are also markedlinguistically, implying some correspondence between linguistic and nonlinguistic spatial categories and a potential rec-onciliation of the competing accounts.