Extracommunicative functions of language: Verbal interference causes selective categorization impairments

Lupyan, Gary

doi:10.3758/pbr.16.4.711

Cited by 78 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…The strategy reports in Experiment 2 suggest that people are more likely to focus attention on one dimension when given a word: When participants could use both shape and hue as a basis for categorization, in the word condition they tended to use one or the other dimension, but in the no-word condition they tended to use both. This result complements Lupyan's (2009) finding that verbal interference disrupts the ability to selectively attend to task-relevant dimensions. It further suggests that words may encourage selective attention even when such attention is neither necessary nor advantageous.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 46%

Words can slow down category learning

2011

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 46%

Words can slow down category learning

2011

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“…The target task we chose was serial visual search (Lupyan, 2009). To ensure that the interference tasks were matched, we created an adaptive staircase paradigm that adjusted the difficulty threshold for the two tasks for each participant until the same empirical level of performance was reached.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verbal interference suppresses exact numerical representation

Frank

Fedorenko

Lai

et al. 2012

Cognitive Psychology

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Language for number is an important case study of the relationship between language and cognition because the mechanisms of non-verbal numerical cognition are well-understood. When the Pirahã (an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe who have no exact number words) are tested in non-verbal numerical tasks, they are able to perform one-to-one matching tasks but make errors in more difficult tasks. Their pattern of errors suggests that they are using analog magnitude estimation, an evolutionarily-and developmentally-conserved mechanism for estimating quantities. Here we show that English-speaking participants rely on the same mechanisms when verbal number representations are unavailable due to verbal interference. Followup experiments demonstrate that the effects of verbal interference are primarily manifest during encoding of quantity information, and-using a new procedure for matching difficulty of interference tasks for individual participants-that the effects are restricted to verbal interference. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that number words are used online to encode, store, and manipulate numerical information. This linguistic strategy complements, rather than altering or replacing, non-verbal representations.

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“…In one study (Lupyan, 2009), participants completed an odd-one out task where they had to choose which picture or word did not belong based on color, size, or thematic relationship while under conditions of verbal interference. Based on prior work suggesting that individuals with anomic aphasia, a subtype of aphasia characterized by poor naming combined with good language comprehension, had specific difficulty with categorization tasks requiring focus on a specific perceptual dimension (Davidoff & Roberson, 2004), we predicted that verbal interference would specifically affect color and size categorization blocks while leaving thematic categorization unaffected.…”

Section: Knowledge Through Language Versus Knowledge Through Perceptimentioning

confidence: 99%

From words-as-mappings to words-as-cues: the role of language in semantic knowledge

Lupyan

Lewis

2017

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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Semantic knowledge (or semantic memory) is knowledge we have about the world. For example, we know that knives are typically sharp, made of metal, and that they are tools used for cutting. To what kinds of experiences do we owe such knowledge? Most work has stressed the role of direct sensory and motor experiences. Another kind of experience, considerably less well understood, is our experience with language. We review two ways of thinking about the relationship between language and semantic knowledge: (i) language as mapping onto independently-acquired concepts, and (ii) language as a set of cues to meaning. We highlight some problems with the words-as-mappings view, and argue in favor of the words-as-cues alternative. We then review some surprising ways that language impacts semantic knowledge, and discuss how distributional semantics models can help us better understand its role. We argue that language has an abstracting effect on knowledge, helping to go beyond concrete experiences which are more characteristic of perception and action. We conclude by describing several promising directions for future research. ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN SEMANTIC KNOWLEDGE 3

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Extracommunicative functions of language: Verbal interference causes selective categorization impairments

Cited by 78 publications

References 32 publications

Words can slow down category learning

Words can slow down category learning

Verbal interference suppresses exact numerical representation

From words-as-mappings to words-as-cues: the role of language in semantic knowledge

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