Categories for names or names for categories? The interplay between domain-specific conceptual structure and language

Various claims have been made in the developmental literature about the relationship between language and categorisation in children. Drawing on the notion of the domain-specificity of cognition, the paper reviews evidence on the effect of language in the classification of and reasoning about categories from different domains. The review looks at the anthropological, infant classification, and preschool categorisation literature. Overall, the analyses suggest that the causal nature and inductive power of animal categories seem to be the least influenced by linguistic and cultural factors, of artifact categories the most, and of human categories somewhere in between these other two kinds. Some gaps on the evidence reviewed are noted and possible theoretical accounts of the emerging pattern are discussed.