Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Classifiers play a fundamental role in shaping how objects are categorized in Mandarin Chinese. We conducted object naming experiments with different types of classifiers as prompts and analyzed the distribution of names via the taxonomic device, by which nouns are divided into three levels according to the level of specificity, i.e., basic (e.g. apple), superordinate (e.g. fruit) and subordinate (e.g. golden apple) levels. We observe that different classifiers induce distinct distributions of names across the three levels. Under the general classifier condition, participants use more general terms for home furnishing objects (e.g., ‘furniture') but not for animals, whereas the specific classifier condition consistently reveals a preference for basic level names (e.g., ‘table'), which are less general and represent the most inclusive category at which objects share common features and can be easily recognized. These findings contribute to our understanding of language production in Mandarin Chinese and highlight the importance of considering grammatical factors when examining referential expression choices.