Universality and language specificity in object naming

Rather than having universal linguistic categories for sets of common objects, languages develop their own, idiosyncratic naming patterns for them. Accounting for these patterns requires reference not only to the understanding of stimulus properties by individual speakers of a language, but also to the linguistic and cultural histories of the language they speak. To better understand how these two sources of influence work together to produce linguistic categories, we examined the relations among linguistic categories for 60 common containers for speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese. We discriminated among several possibilities that imply different relative contributions of the two sources of influence. No single type of relation dominated; the contributions of the two influences varied across different parts of the container domain. We suggest that perception of stimulus properties by individuals interacts with linguistic and cultural histories, but their interaction is constrained by structure in the stimulus space.