Cognitive Representation of the Persian Category  Flower based on the Prototype Theory

The current work investigated the prototypes of the concrete category of ‘flower’ for Persian-speaking male and female students of primary school (10-13 years old), middle school (13-15 years old) and high school (16-18 years old) and also college students of agriculture, psychology and medical sciences. It also investigated the effect of age, gender and educational background on these prototypes based on Rosch (1975) and Liu et al.’s (2009) methodologies. To collect data, different groups of participants were provided with two types of questionnaires in two steps. In the first questionnaire, participants were asked to write whatever examples they recalled from the category of ‘flower’. In the second questionnaire, which was based on the first one, participants were asked to score each member of the category from 1 to 5. Rose, Damascus rose and lilac were found to be strong prototypes for the category of ‘flower’ in Persian language in all the twelve groups of Persian-speaking students. The results also showed that environmental factors have a great effect on prototype formation of the category ‘flower’ in Persian language.