What's in a Name? Brain Activity Reveals Categorization Processes Differ Across Languages

The linguistic relativity hypothesis proposes that speakers of different languages perceive and conceptualize the world differently, but do their brains reflect these differences? In English, most nouns do not provide linguistic clues to their categories, whereas most Mandarin Chinese nouns provide explicit category information, either morphologically (e g, the morpheme "vehicle" che1 (sic) in the noun "train" huo3che1 (sic)) or orthographically (e g, the radical "bug" chong2 (sic) in the character for the noun "butterfly" hu2dre2 (sic)). When asked to judge the membership of atypical (e g, train) vs typical (e.g., car) pictorial exemplars of a category (e g, vehicle), English speakers (N = 26) showed larger N300 and N400 event-related potential (ERP) component differences, whereas Mandarin speakers (N = 27) showed no such differences. Further investigation with Mandarin speakers only (N = 22) found that it was the morphologically transparent items that did not show a typicality effect, whereas orthographically transparent items elicited moderate N300 and N400 effects In a follow-up study with English speakers only (N = 25), morphologically transparent items also showed different patterns of N300 and N400 activation than nontransparent items even for English speakers Together, these results demonstrate that even for pictorial stimuli, how and whether category information is embedded in object names affects the extent to which typicality is used in category judgments, as shown in N300 and N400 responses. Hum Brain Mapp 31 1786-1801, 2010 (C) 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.