The notion that the form of a word bears an arbitrary relation to its meaning accounts only
partly for the attested relations between form and meaning in the languages of the world. …

… In a recent study designed to examine the categorization-aphasia link more exhaustively,
Lupyan and Mirman (under review) found that a group of patients with aphasia (selected on …

Learning is using past experiences to inform new behaviors and actions. Because all
experiences are unique, learning always requires some generalization. An effective way of …

Background Languages differ greatly both in their syntactic and morphological systems and
in the social environments in which they exist. We challenge the view that language …

… In a follow-up to the present study (Lupyan, 2006), the presence of labels protected
learned categories from interference when novel stimuli were introduced during training, and …

Can what we know change what we see? Does language affect cognition and perception?
The last few years have seen increased attention to these seemingly disparate questions, but …

Linguistic labels (eg, “chair”) seem to activate visual properties of the objects to which they
refer. Here we investigated whether language-based activation of visual representations can …

The bouba/kiki effect—the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki
with a spiky shape—is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual …

Does language change what we perceive? Does speaking different languages cause us to
perceive things differently? We review the behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for …

… Verbal labels may help speakers construct representations that are, indeed, more stable
across time and across individuals than representations constructed without labels ( Lupyan, …