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Note to A Strickler: I've completed my edits, so after you finish you can move to the final article. I feel like the Identification and discrimination section should be earlier on in the article, and the Sapir-Whorf section already exists and needs to be replaced.

Identification and discrimination tasks

The study of categorical perception often uses experiments involving discrimination and identification tasks in order to categorize participants' perceptions of sounds. Voice onset time (VOT) is measured along a continuum rather than a binary. English bilabial stops /b/ and /p/ are voiced and voiceless counterparts of the same place and manner of articulation, yet native speakers distinguish the sounds primarily by where they fall on the VOT continuum. Participants in these experiments establish clear phoneme boundaries on the continuum; two sounds with different VOT will be perceived as the same phoneme if on the same side of the boundary. Participants take longer to discriminate between two sounds falling in the same category of VOT than between two on opposite sides of the phoneme boundary, even if the difference in VOT is greater between the two in the same category.

Identification

In a categorical perception identification task, participants often must identify stimuli, such as speech sounds. An experimenter testing the perception of the VOT boundary between /p/ and /b/ may play several sounds falling on various parts of the VOT continuum and ask volunteers whether they hear each sound as /p/ or /b/. In such experiments, sounds on one side of the boundary are heard almost universally as /p/ and on the other as /b/. Stimuli on or near the boundary take longer to identify and are reported differently by different volunteers, but are perceived as either /b/ or /p/, rather than as a sound somewhere in the middle.

Discrimination

A simple AB discrimination task presents participants with two options and participants must decide if they are identical. Predictions for a discrimination task in an experiment are often based on the preceding identification task. An ideal discrimination experiment validating categorical perception of stop consonants would result in volunteers more often correctly discriminating stimuli that fall on opposite sides of the boundary, while discriminating at chance level on the same side of the boundary.

In an ABX discrimination task, volunteers are presented with three stimuli. A and B must be distinct stimuli and volunteers decide which of the two the third stimulus X matches. This discrimination task is much more common than a simple AB task.

The Whorf hypothesis

According to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (of which Lawrence's acquired similarity/distinctiveness effects would simply be a special case), language affects the way that people perceive the world. For example, colors are perceived categorically only because they happen to be named categorically: Our subdivisions of the spectrum are arbitrary, learned, and vary across cultures and languages. Supporters of the Whorf hypothesis believe in language relativism, the idea that a speaker's native language shapes their perception of the world. The hypothesis as it relates to Categorical Perception is often applied to color perception; relativists believe that how colors are named in different languages affect how native speakers of each language perceive them.

Universalism, in contrasts to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, posits that perceptual categories are innate, and are unaffected by the language that one speaks.

Support

Support of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis describes instances in which speakers of one language demonstrate categorical perception in a way that is different from speakers of another language. Examples of such evidence are provided below:

Regier and Kay (2009) reported evidence that linguistic categories affect categorical perception primarily in the right-eye visual field. The right-eye visual field is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain, which also controls language faculties. Davidoff (2001) presented evidence that in color discrimination tasks, native English speakers discriminated easier between color stimuli across a determined blue-green boundary than within the same side, but did not show CP when given the same task with Berinmo "nol" and "wor"; Berinmo speakers performed oppositely.

A popular theory in current research is "weak-Whorfianism,' which is the theory that although there is a strong universal component to perception, cultural differences still have an impact. For example, a 1998 study found that while there was evidence of universal perception of color between speakers of Setswana and English, there were also marked differences between the two language groups.

Criticism

Criticism of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis should give evidence that objects that are categorically perceived are defined in the same ways in different languages--that would give evidence that language is not affecting the perception of the speakers of a language. People who agree with these criticisms can be considered Universalists, who believe in innate perception of categories. Examples of research that supports the Universalist view is given below:

According to Berlin & Kay (1969), most cultures and languages subdivide and name the color spectrum the same way, and the regions of compression and separation are the same for those that don't. All blues are seen alike and all greens are seen alike, with a fuzzy boundary in between, regardless of the color terms in a speaker's native language.

Experimental research has explored whether children demonstrate categorical perception differently than adults. Eimas et al. (1971) investigated infants' ability to discriminate between two sounds after being habituated to one. They found that the infants were able to react to the difference between the two sounds (/p/ and /b/) faster when they belonged to different categories than when the two sounds belonged to the same categories. The sounds from the same category would both be categorized as the same sound for adult speakers of English. The main result is that infants demonstrate the same category boundaries as adults, even though they do not yet produce the sounds, which evidences that category boundaries are innate.

Other research has more recently been done comparing speakers of different languages. Franklin et al. (2004) found that children's knowledge about terms for color does not affect their perception of colors. This study found that both English and Himba speaking toddlers showed no difference in ability to categorize colors, regardless of the language that they were speaking and how well they knew the color terms of that language.