Universality and language specificity in object naming

Malt, Barbara C.; Sloman, Steven A.; Gennari, Silvia P.

doi:10.1016/s0749-596x(03)00021-4

Cited by 145Categorization, perception, and languageLanguage and cultural evolutionLanguage and Culture

Universality and language specificity in object naming

Malt, Barbara C., Sloman, Steven A., Gennari, Silvia P.·2003·Journal of Memory and Language

DOI 10.1016/s0749-596x(03)00021-4

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More fine-grained linguistic phenomena differ widely across languages and often deviate from findings in English.
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“Finally, in a second experimental session, 21 of the 25 bilingual participants (along with monolingual participants who were different from those who performed the naming and sorting reported here) provided typicality ratings for use in more detailed analyses, not reported here, of the structure of the linguistic cate…”
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“Importantly, they (Malt et al., 2003) established that the three languages did not differ simply by diverging in classification of peripheral members of otherwise comparable categories.”
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“However, languages often differ in how they label even common objects (eg, Malt & Sloman, 2003 ; Malt, Sloman, & Gennari, 2003 ).”
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“…results for bicultural bilinguals presented here and other emerging findings, such as those by Malt and colleagues (e.g., Ameel et al., 2005, 2009; Malt et al., 1999, 2003; Pavlenko & Malt, 2011), and by Athanasopoulos and colleagues on colour perception (Athanasopoulos, 2009, 2011;…”
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“Malt et al. (1999, in press) and Malt, Sloman and Gennari (2003) argue that the naming patterns of a language are influenced by a language’s history and the history of the culture that uses it. The vocabulary”
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“Malt, Sloman, and Gennari (2003) examined in more detail the relation among the linguistic categories of the three languages for the 60 containers and found a complex pattern.”
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“In a series of studiesMalt and colleagues have investigated the relationship between perceived similarity between containers and the names given to them (Ameel et al., 2005; Malt et al., 2003; Malt et al., 1999; Pavlenko and Malt, 2013).”
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“…on concepts, with contributions from psychologists (Osherson & Smith 1981, 1982, 1997; Medin 1989; Malt 1994, 1995; Medin, Lynch, & Solomon 2000; Malt, Sloman, & Gennari 2003; Murphy 2004; Malt & Sloman 2007; Carey 2009), linguists (e.g., Lakoﬀ 1973; Kamp & Partee 1995; Jäger 2007, 2010), and…”
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“When this approach is applied to cultural artifacts, containers in particular, however, the bio-physical affordances seem more complex and less salient allowing for more radical cultural variability (Malt et al. 2003).”
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“Previous studies of L2 lexical acquisition indeed suggest that L2 learners have difficulty in adjusting the structure of the lexical domain in L2 when the corresponding lexical domain in L1 is structured differently (Ijaz, 1986; Jiang, 2002; Malt et al., 2003; Odlin, 1989).”
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“…and household storage and serving vessels, and observed across Spanish, English, Chinese, Dutch, French, Russian, and more (Graham and Belnap, 1986; Malt et al., 1999, 2003; Ameel et al., 2005; Pavlenko and Malt, 2011; see Malt and Majid, 2013 for review). www.frontiersin.org October 2014 | Volume…”
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“In Oller and Eilers’ (2002) study of bilinguals in the Miami context, SES was directly controlled for, so that half the children in each group came from high-SES families, and half from low-SES families. In that study, a consistent finding across linguistic measures was that for English, high-SES children had the earl…”
Background
Conversation and convention: Enduring influences on name choice for common objects
Malt, B. C., & Sloman, S. A. (2004) · Memory & Cognition · doi:10.3758/bf03206325 · Cited by 28 · see citing works
“Patterns of naming appear to emerge over the history of a language and are driven by more than perceived or inferred properties of the objects (see also Hock & Joseph, 1996; Malt et al., 2003b; Singleton, 2000).”
BackgroundSelf-citation
The syntactic packaging of caused motion components in a second language: English learners of Chinese
Ji, Y., & Hohenstein, J. M. (2014) · Lingua · doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2013.11.009 · Cited by 27 · see citing works
French categorization norms for 70 semantic categories and comparison with Van Overschelde et al.’s (2004) English norms
Bueno, S., & Megherbi, H. (2009) · Behavior Research Methods · doi:10.3758/brm.41.4.1018 · Cited by 27 · see citing works
“With a ciocultural influences has also been underlined by Cordier (2002), Malt, Sloman, and Gennari (2003), and Yoon et al. (2004) in an intercultural and interage comparison for the latter.”
Background
Overhearing Dialogues and Monologues: How Does Entrainment Lead to More Comprehensible Referring Expressions?
Tolins, J., Zeamer, C. A., & Tree, J. E. F. (2017) · Discourse Processes · doi:10.1080/0163853x.2017.1279516 · Cited by 23 · see citing works
Conventional Wisdom: Negotiating Conventions of Reference Enhances Category Learning
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Development of cross-language lexical influence: divergence, not convergence
White, A., Malt, B. C., Verheyen, S., & Storms, G. (2017) · International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism · doi:10.1080/13670050.2017.1341467 · Cited by 21 · see citing works
Self-citation
Local similarity and global variability characterize the semantic space of human languages
Lewis, M. L., Cahill, A., Madnani, N., & Evans, J. A. (2023) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2300986120 · Cited by 20 · see citing works
Naming motion events in Spanish and English
Férez, P. C., & Gentner, D. (2006) · Cognitive Linguistics · doi:10.1515/cog.2006.014 · Cited by 20 · see citing works
The semantics and morphology of household container names in Icelandic and Dutch
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“Following Malt et al. (2003), Ameel et al. (2005) report the dominant terms for their stimuli, including the Dutch responses to the 67 dishes stimuli, where dominant terms refers to the term given most often for a particular stimulus.”
BackgroundMethodResultInfluential
Picture naming in bilingual and monolingual Chinese speakers: Capturing similarity and variability
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The impact of ChatGPT on human data collection: A case study involving typicality norming data
Heyman, T., & Heyman, G. (2023) · Behavior Research Methods · doi:10.3758/s13428-023-02235-w · Cited by 16 · see citing works
“The translations might not correspond to the same underlying mental representation (Malt et al., 2003), so it could introduce some noise and in turn deﬂate the correlation between the original judgments and ChatGPT’s output.”
Background
Where Are the Concepts? What Words Can and Can't Reveal
Malt, B. C., Gennari, S. P., Imai, M., Ameel, E., Saji, N., & Majid, A. (2015) · The MIT Press eBooks · doi:10.7551/mitpress/9383.003.0019 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
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Conceptualising voluntary motion events beyond language use: A comparison of English and Chinese speakers’ similarity judgments
Ji, Y., & Hohenstein, J. M. (2017) · Lingua · doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2017.05.007 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
“The former holds that there is some cognitive universal shared by speakers of different languages, and any variations in surface linguistic encoding of motion events are no more than different instantiations of a single common conceptual framework (see, for instance, Jackendoff, 1996; Landau and Lakusta, 2006; McWhort…”
Background
Brain decoding in multiple languages: Can cross-language brain decoding work?
Xu, M., Li, D., & Li, P. (2021) · Brain and Language · doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2021.104922 · Cited by 15 · see citing works
Seri landscape classification and spatial reference
O’Meara, C. (2010) · Dissertations & Theses @ SUNY Buffalo,ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global · Cited by 14 · see citing works
Gaps in the Lexicon Restrict Communication
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“For example, Persian lexicalizes in a single word ænduh emotions that English speakers distinguish as grief and regret ( Jackson et al., 2019); Spanish speakers use the single label frasco for both a squeezable mustard bottle and a peanut butter jar (Malt et al., 1999, 2003).”
Background
Naming Artifacts
Malt, B. C. (2010) · The Psychology of learning and motivation/The psychology of learning and motivation · doi:10.1016/s0079-7421(10)52001-2 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
“These groupings of different sizes were not merely nested groupings reflecting finer and coarser differentiation; they were not all formed around the same centers and they partially cross-cut each other (Malt et al., 2003).”
BackgroundSelf-citation
Systematicity in the semantics of noun compounds: The role of artifacts vs. natural kinds
Levin, B., Glass, L., & Jurafsky, D. (2019) · Linguistics · doi:10.1515/ling-2019-0013 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
“Finally, other factors that enter into giving names to entities might come into play, such as those extensively discussed by Malt and her colleagues (Malt et al. 2003; Malt and Sloman 2004; Sloman et al. 2001: 82–84).”
Background
Conceptual transfer and lexical development in adjectives of space: Evidence from judgments, reaction times, and eye tracking
Wolter, B., Yamashita, J., & Leung, C. Y. (2020) · Applied Psycholinguistics · doi:10.1017/s0142716420000107 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
“Examples would include the English jar and the Spanish frasco (Malt et al., 2003).”
Background
Structures conceptuelles, représentation des objets et des relations entre les objets.
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Applying Non-Linguistic Frameworks for Investigating the Language Transfer
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Reseptiivinen monikielisyys: miten suomenkielinen oppija ymmärtää viroa äidinkielensä pohjalta?
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The Perspective from Cognitive Neuroscience
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Précis of Doing without Concepts
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Re-learning labeled categories reveals structured representations
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Granularity in the Verbalization of Events and Objects
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Female Camel Nomenclature among Arabia’s Bedouins
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Colour terms: native language semantic structure and artificial language structure formation in a large-scale online smartphone application
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“This is what we call the semantic structure of a language: It refers to the way a language divides a meaning space into linguistic categories (Youn et al., 2016; “ categorical structure ” in Carr et al., 2017; Malt et al., 2003).”
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A Thing Is What We Say It Is: Referential Communication and Indirect Category Learning
Voiklis, J. (2008) · CogPrints (University of Southampton) · doi:10.7916/d8tx3sjm · Cited by 6 · see citing works
Messages must be tuned to the target language: Some implications of crosslinguistic semantic diversity for neurolinguistic research on speech production
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Apples, tomatoes, and health: comparison of structural characteristics of the L1 and L2 mental lexicons
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Communication Leads to the Emergence of Sub-optimal Category Structures
Silvey, C., Kirby, S., & Smith, K. (2013) · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · Cited by 5 · see citing works
Learning the Language of Locomotion: Do Children Use Biomechanical Structure to Constrain Hypotheses about Word Meaning?
Malt, B. C., White, A., Ameel, E., & Storms, G. (2016) · Language Learning and Development · doi:10.1080/15475441.2016.1171152 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
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VERBAL FLUENCY: NORMS FOR THE LAKOTA POPULATION IN SEMANTIC AND PHONEMIC FLUENCY TASKS
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How words anchor categorization: conceptual flexibility with labeled and unlabeled categories ‡
Tolins, J., & Colunga, E. (2014) · Language and Cognition · doi:10.1017/langcog.2014.26 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Context sensitivity and insensitivity in object naming
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The acquisition of the English dative alternation by Russian Foreign Language Learners
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A computational model of bilingual semantic convergence.
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Crosslinguistic influence in the acquisition of Greek as a foreign language by Spanish/Catalan L1 learners: The role of proficiency and stays abroad
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Culture as a Vehicle for Studying Individual Differences
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Theoretical discussion
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An Economic and Cultural Commentary
Jones, D. M. (2005) · Cited by 2 · see citing works
Between versus Within-Language Differences in Linguistic Categorization.
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Object naming and later lexical development
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A szentimentérték módosulásának a problémája a magyar nyelvű szövegek szentimentelemzésében, különös tekintettel az értékvesztésre és az értékváltásra
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“In many respects, non-verbal representations are similar across languages despite linguistic differences because the physical world is largely shared, and its regularities are similarly learned (Malt et al., 2003, 2008; Papafragou et al., 2002; Ünal et al., 2021).”
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Semantic convergence in the bilingual lexicon
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Knowing versus Naming: Similarity and the Linguistic Categorization of Artifacts
Malt, B. C., Sloman, S. A., Gennari, S. P., Shi, M., & Wang, Y. (1999) · Journal of Memory and Language · doi:10.1006/jmla.1998.2593 · Cited by 400 · see citing works
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Naming variation across languages is shaped by shared histories, semantics and familiarityPreprint
Kučerová, A., Meloni, C. Y., & List, J. (2026) · doi:10.31234/osf.io/8tq2p_v1
Speaking vs. Thinking about Objects and Actions
Malt, B. C., Sloman, S. A., & Gennari, S. P. (2001)
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UNIVERSAL AND LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC PATTERNS OF CATEGORIZATION
Athanasopoulos, P. (2011)
Perceived similarity and categorization of artifacts by English and Chinese speakers
Shi, M. (1996)

Authors: Malt, B. C., Sloman, S. A., & Gennari, S. P.
Affiliations: Lehigh University (US)
Brown University (US)
University of Wisconsin–Madison (US)
Corresponding author: Malt, Barbara C.
ORCID: Malt, Barbara C.
Sloman, Steven A.
Gennari, Silvia P.
Venue: Journal of Memory and Language
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Published: 2003-07
Volume: 49
Issue: 1
Pages: 20-42
ISSN: 0749-596X (ISSN-L)
DOI: 10.1016/s0749-596x(03)00021-4
OpenAlex: W1998032198
Cited by: 143
References: 66
Citations by year: 2026: 2 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 28 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 18 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 6 · 2014: 10 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 7
FWCI: 4.30
Type: journal article
Language: en
Open access: closed
Licence: www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/ (tdm)
Locations: Journal of Memory and Language (publishedVersion)
Topics: Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Categorization, perception, and language
Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Language and Culture
Keywords: object naming, linguistic categories, language specificity, universality, containers, cross-linguistic comparison, English language, Spanish language, Chinese, stimulus characteristics, cultural history, categorization

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