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Language effects on the conceptualization of hybrids*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

NIRA MASHAL ,
YESHAYAHU SHEN ,
KARINE JOSPE  and
DAVID GIL
NIRA MASHAL*
Affiliation:
School of Education, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, IsraelGonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
YESHAYAHU SHEN
Affiliation:
Program of Cognitive Studies of Language Use, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
KARINE JOSPE
Affiliation:
Department of Education and Psychology, The Open University, Israel
DAVID GIL
Affiliation:
Linguistics, Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
*
†Address for correspondence: Dr Nira Mashal, School of Education, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. tel: (972)-3-5317178; fax: (972)-3-7384029; e-mail: nmashal2@gmail.com
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Abstract

The current study investigates the conceptual hierarchy of humans−animals−plants−non-animate objects by using novel hybrids. Three experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, twenty-one participants were presented with a grammatically asymmetrical phrase, in which the two components are associated with different linguistic properties, (e.g., a man with a horse’s head) followed by a visual hybrid, and were asked to judge whether the phrase described the hybrid. In Experiment 2, thirty participants were presented with a visual hybrid and were asked to categorize it according to one of its visually presented components in a forced-choice judgment task. In Experiment 3, twenty-nine participants were presented with a visual hybrid that followed a grammatically symmetrical phrase, in which both components carry similar grammatical properties (e.g., half-human half-horse), and were asked to judge whether the phrase described the hybrid. A conceptual hierarchy effect was found in Experiment 1 but not in the other two experiments. These findings show that the hierarchy effect occurs only in verbal tasks that involve asymmetrical grammatical constructions. We suggest that the pragmatic tendency to map the hierarchically higher concept onto the higher grammatical function applies to asymmetrical constructions but not to symmetrical constructions.

Keywords

conceptual hierarchyhybridscategorization
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , June 2014 , pp. 217 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2014 

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by Grant No. 969-07 from the Israel Science Foundation of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities to the second author.

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