PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The distinction between concrete and abstract nouns has been postulated since several thousand years in ancient Greek and in Chinese language philosophy. Furthermore, within the category of concrete nouns the proper names are considered as a distinct subgroup. Such linguistic categories may reflect cognitive structures since they are common in all languages or they may be completely artificial. Mandarin Chinese speakers are able to process proper names faster than common nouns in a lexical decision task. This is true for persons' first names and geographic names, but not for brand names. This finding is modality independent. In terms of reaction time, brand names are more similar to common nouns. Despite of major differences between Chinese and Indo-European languages, the same dissociation between proper names and common nouns has been found as in German and English. This can be seen as an additional hint for the existence of cognitive universals.