Do words reveal concepts?

Do words reveal concepts? Barbara C. Malt (barbara.malt@lehigh.edu) Department of Psychology, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 18015, USA Eef Ameel (eef.ameel@psy.kuleuven.be) Department of Psychology, University of Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium, Silvia Gennari (s.gennari@psych.york.ac.uk) Department of Psychology, University of York, York, England Mutsumi Imai (imai@sfc.keio.ac.jp ) and Noburo Saji (nons@sfc.keio.ac.jp) Department of Environmental Information, Keio University at Shonan-Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan Asifa Majid (asifa.majid@mpi.nl) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands Abstract Rogers & McClelland, 2004), conceptual combination (e.g., Hampton, 1997), and neuroscience (.e.g., Mahon & Caramazza, 2007). But from a cross-linguistic perspective, this approach is startling. There are many possible ways to map between words and the world, and languages vary dramatically in how they carve up the world by name. Substantial cross- linguistic variation has been documented in domains including color, causality, mental states, number, body parts, containers, motion, direction, spatial relations, and terms for acts of cutting and breaking and of carrying and holding (see chapters in Malt & Wolff, 2010, for illustrations). This variation occurs even in concrete domains labeled by nouns, where structure in the world might seem most likely to provide universally recognized groupings captured by words. Hand vs. arm, bottle vs. jar, or dish vs. plate may seem to English-speakers to be self-evident distinctions based on obvious discontinuities in the distribution of properties in the world, but not all languages observe these same distinctions (e.g., Malt et al., 1999; Majid, Enfield, & Van Staden, 2006). In light of the documented diversity, there are three possibilities for the relationship between words and concepts. The first is that the words of a language do effectively reveal much of the stock of general-purpose concepts that a person holds. Given cross-linguistic variability in naming patterns, this possibility implies that word-learning creates much of the language user’s non- linguistic representations of the world. Under this scenario, it is not possible to hold that any substantial stock of basic concepts is shared across speakers of different languages, since the language-specific sets will be substantially different from one another. The second possibility is that concepts are dissociated to some notable extent from the large differences in naming patterns, and it is therefore impossible to use words to identify concepts. After all, much learning about the world To study concepts, cognitive scientists must first identify some. The prevailing assumption is that they are revealed by words such as triangle, table, and robin. But languages vary dramatically in how they carve up the world by name. Either ordinary concepts must be heavily language-dependent or names cannot be a direct route to concepts. We asked English, Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese speakers to name videos of human locomotion and judge their similarities. We investigated what name inventories and scaling solutions on name similarity and on physical similarity for the groups individually and together suggest about the underlying concepts. Aggregated naming and similarity solutions converged on results distinct from the answers suggested by any single language. Words such as triangle, table, and robin help identify the conceptual space of a domain, but they do not directly reveal units of knowledge usefully considered “concepts. ” Keywords: concepts; naming; cross-linguistic diversity; universality; locomotion Introduction Concepts have been said to give human experience stability (Smith & Medin, 1981), to hold our mental world together (Murphy, 2002), and to provide the foundation of human learning (Bloom, 2004). Fodor (1998) considered concepts so fundamental to cognition that he declared that the heart of a cognitive science is its theory of concepts. If concepts are so important, then cognitive scientists need to be able to identify concepts to study. We ask here how concepts are to be found, and in particular what role words can play in identifying them. The prevailing assumption has been that many important concepts can be easily identified because they are revealed by words – in fact, for many researchers, the words of English. English nouns such as hat, fish, triangle, table, and robin are used to identify concepts in work encompassing not only the adult concepts literature but developmental work (e.g., Carey, 2009), computational models (e.g.,