A cross-cultural study of language and cognition: Numeral classifiers and solid object categorization.

One of the central issues in cognition is identifying universal and culturally specific patterns of thought. In this study, we examined how one aspect of culture, a linguistic part of speech known asclassifiers, are related to categorization of solid objects. In Experiment 1, we used a numeral classifier elicitation task to examine the classifiers used by speakers of Hmong, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese (N = 34) with 135 nouns that referred to solid objects.