Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Language affects perception. But how? Recent findings (Boutonnet & Lupyan, 2015; Bocanegra, Poletiek &Zwaan, submitted) suggest a dissociation between perception that is mediated as compared to not mediated by language.One explanation is that language –that is combinatorial in nature- stresses the separate features of objects. We investigatedthe effect of combinatorial (two words) and non-combinatorial (one word) labels on the perceptual separation of features invisual recognition. Participants were trained to categorize meaningless objects with two dimensions: shape and height. Eachcategory had either a one word name; or a two words name reflecting its features. Participants then were tested on new objects. Combinatorial labels enhanced categorization performance as compared to single labels. This suggests that language, bydecomposing objects into parts, might drive dimension separation in vision as well.