This study examined the influence of cultural familiarity and language factors in producing cross-cultural variations in typicality gradients. Thirty Chinese speakers living in Taiwan and 30 English speakers from the United States rated the proto typicality of exemplars from 10 super ordinate categories. Another 30 persons from each culture rated the relative familiarity in their experience of each exemplar. Strong cross-cultural variations were found in typicality gradients. Cultural familiarity was found to be correlated with typicality structures in both cultures but was more strongly related to the typicality gradients of American than Taiwanese-Chinese participants. However, for Chinese speakers, super ordinate category classifiers tended to be correlated with typicality gradients, particularly for those categories in which the familiarity and typicality relationships were low. It is concluded that language structure may moderate the influence of other important variables in producing cross-cultural variation in category structures.
關聯:
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology,Vol. 26, No. 2, p.153-168