Professor Karla K. McGregor is member of the Communication Sciences and Disorders and the DeLTA Center; University of Iowa, USA. In her guest talk she deals with the problem that although we know that variation in life experiences affects the number of word categories children learn (Hoff, 2006), we know less about how this variation affects the semantic content and organization of word categories. She presents a study in which U.S., Australian, and Taiwanese children and adults took part who were asked to name animals and foods for one minute each. For all ages and cultures, both animals and foods were clustered by taxonomy and situation. McGregor explains the results from this study.