Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper reviews the existing literature on categorical perception of sounds and colors in different animals including humans. We highlight that categorical perception is a combination of nature and nurture; to be specific, categorical perception is innate with a phylogenetic root, but it can also be modified by postnatal experience. We also suggest that language is not wholly the basis for categorical perception, as what Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posits; instead, language is one type of experience that can affect the nurture part of categorical perception across domains and modalities in humans.