Cultural Linguistics and Categorization: Boundary-Crossing and Cultural Categories

Cultural categories emerge as a product of collective cognition, and in the age of globalization, their change with individuals’ cross-cultural experience deserves our attention. While a general distinction can be made between “holistic view” and “analytic view” to account for Eastern and Western cognitive styles, respectively (Nisbett and Masuda 2003), a growing number of researchers have found that intercultural experience enables people to adopt a more flexible and dynamic view (Hong et al. 2000, 2003). By three experiments of classification tasks, our study showed that, consistent with previous studies, Taiwanese participants preferred categorizing photos of objects by their thematic associations (e.g., “cow” and “milk”). However, they shifted to taxonomic classification (e.g., “cow” and “camel”) when they were presented with stimuli in written words. Also, they showed a significant preference for thematic associations when given Oriental-specific objects to categorize (e.g., “Buddha,” “dumpling,” etc.), compared with Western cultural objects such as “knight” and “steak.” More importantly, participants with experience of living in America or Europe tend to keep disparate frames for each task. The results support a dynamic view of cultural frames—participants are sensitive to linguistic and cultural backgrounds and adopt cognitive styles according to contextual clues. The findings imply a more adaptable view on categorization in Cultural Linguistics.