Cognitive Style and Perception: The Relationship between Category Width and Speech Perception, Categorization, and Discrimination

Abstract

Category width, as defined by Pettigrew's (1958) Category Width Scale, is a cognitive variable that purportedly reveals individual differences in categorization strategy. Subjects differ in terms of broadness and narrowness of judgments of category width--to what extent they will accept exemplars as good instances of a category. We tested the hypothesis that category width would be related to how subjects behave in different speech perception tasks. Differences found between extremely broad and narrow categorizers on such tasks would be helpful in understanding the nature of the perceptual and cognitive processes underlying the category width distinction. No effects attributable to category width were found when results were analyzed in terms of subjects' (a) discrimination and feature evaluation of auditory and visual information in speech events, (b) integration of these sources of information, (c) the process of decision, and (d) subjective preference for a two-choice versus a nine-choice response method. The results from both male and female and broad and narrow categorizers supported the predictions made by a fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP). In the FLMP, people have access to continuous information about each feature of a stimulus, they make independent evaluations of each feature based on this information, the various features are integrated, and a decision is made based on the relative support for the viable alternatives. Given the common processes involved in speech and other pattern perceptual-recognition tasks, we conclude that fundamental processes involved in pattern recognition are unlikely to vary with personality measures, such as category width.