Language, perceptual categories and their interaction : insights from computational modelling

How do humans acquire perceptual categories? This question is far from being resolved. Specifically the balance between the influence of nature and nurture on perceptual categories remains the topic of heated debate. We present a computational model and take as case study colour categories to study two issues in perceptual category acquisition. The first issue is the effect of linguistic communication on categories during their acquisition: we demonstrate how categories can become coordinated under the influence of language. The second issue concerns the amount of coordination needed between the categories of individuals in order to achieve unambiguous communication. We show that, depending on how strictly linguistic utterances are interpreted, coordination of the individuals’ categories is not always a prerequisite for successful communication.

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