Do we structure object-related conceptual information according to real-world sensorimotor experience, or can it also be shaped by linguistic information? This study investigates whether a feature of language coded in grammar--numeral classifiers--affects the conceptual representation of objects. We compared speakers of Mandarin (a classifier…

The authors present 2 experiments that establish the presence of knowledge partitioning in perceptual categorization. Many participants learned to rely on a context cue, which did not predict category membership but identified partial boundaries, to gate independent partial categorization strategies. When participants partitioned their knowledge,…