Language can alter our mental conceptions of space, time, and categories. While there is compelling evidence that thought can be shaped by syntactic, morphological, and lexical features of a language, less is known about the impact of phonology on thought. This dissertation uses novel objects (alien cartoon figures) and pseudoword names in three…

Although it has been established that human beings process concrete and abstract words differently, it is still a matter of debate what factors contribute to this difference. Since concrete concepts are closely tied to sensory perception, perceptual experience seems to play an important role in their processing. The present study investigated the…

Disagreement exists regarding the functional locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming. This effect is a cornerstone of modern psycholinguistic models of word production, which assume that it arises in lexical response-selection. However, recent evidence from studies of dual-task performance suggests a locus in…

Most works in cognitive semantics have been focusing on the manner, in which an individual behaves--be it the mind, brain, or even computers, which process various kinds of information. Among humans, in particular, social life is richly cultured. Sociality and culture are made possible by cognitive studies; they provide specific inputs to…

This paper explores the long-term effects of assigning cultural symbols to one's natural sensory experiences. Sixty-two Washington State residents of differing occupations, ages 16-51, participated in the study. Participants' responses to the question, "When did you first learn the color green?" fell into two main categories. Some…

Ethnoscience studies, and studies of color vocabulary in particular, have firmly established that to understand the full range of meaning of a word in any language, each new language must be approached on its own terms, without a priori theories of semantic universals. It has been shown that color words in fact encode a great deal of…

This study asks two questions: Is there intracultural variation among the Baganda of Uganda in the cognition of color terms; and if there is, what are the sociocultural correlates of this variation? The color terminology of the Baganda is described, and several psycholinguistic techniques are used to determine the cognition of these terms. These…