Analyzing the Cognition of Persian Speakers in Terms of Categorization:Taxonomic or Thematic Categorization?

Categorization as a form of organization and placing different things, including phenomena, objects, events and the like in different groups, is a kind of cognitive function in human beings that occurs based on the common "taxonomy" of categories or the thematic "relationships" that occur between them. Research shows that Western and East Asian cognitive performance, especially that of the Chinese, is quite different in terms of categorization; Accordingly, Westerners classify things on the basis of "category" (taxonomic categorization) and East Asians do so on the basis of "relationships" (thematic categorization). The present study evaluated and analyzed their cognitive performance by performing two tests in the form of visual and verbal questionnaires on 50 Persian male and female speakers. The visual questionnaire showed that out of 50 Persian participants, 70% carried out the categorization based on "relationships"; the verbal questionnaire also confirmed the result of the former and showed that 76% of Persian speakers, during the process of categorization, have considered the "relationship" criterion and, in fact, have acted on the syntagmatic axis. On this basis, it can be concluded that, firstly, the cognitive function is not the same in all human beings, and secondly, the cognition of Persian speakers in the field of categorization operates on the syntagmatic axis, unlike Westerners who in fact "classify" and act on the paradigmatic axis