Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Systems of nominal classification act as a functional means of categorisation, yet the number and type of categorieswithin these systems vary considerably across languages. The impact of vastly different classification systems on thecognitive representations of concepts is intriguing. We designed a suite of experiments to compare classifier systems in sixOceanic languages, chosen because their inventory of classifiers ranges from two to 23. Effective categorisation needs tobe informative to maximise communicative efficiency, but also simple to minimise cognitive load. Our sample languagesallow us to investigate the trade-off between the two principles of informativeness and simplicity to shed light on therelative optimality of their classification systems. Results from 122 participants across three experiments (free listing,card sorting, video vignettes) indicate that cognitive salience varies as a function of classifier inventory. We discuss theimplications of these results for the nature of nominal classification.