Listeners of various languages tend to perceive an illusory vowel inside consonant clusters that are illegal in their native language. Here, we test whether this phenomenon arises after phoneme categorization or rather interacts with it. We assess the perception of illegal consonant clusters in native speakers of Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese,…

In one form of category-based induction, people make predictions about unknown properties of objects. There is a tension between predictions made based on the object's specific features (e.g., objects above a certain size tend not to fly) and those made by reference to category-level knowledge (e.g., birds fly). Seven experiments with artificial…

Basic-level picture naming is hampered by the presence of a semantically related context word (compared to an unrelated word), whereas picture categorization is facilitated by a semantically related context word. This reversal of the semantic context effect has been explained by assuming that in categorization tasks, basic-level distractor words…

According to "noun-cue" models, arbitrary linguistic categories, like those associated with case and gender systems, are difficult to learn unless members of the target category (i.e., nouns) are marked with phonological or semantic cues that reliably co-occur with grammatical morphemes (e.g., determiners) that exemplify the categories. "Syntactic…