You might look at David Hyerle's work on Thinking Maps (r)

Mike

If you are refering to phonological categories, here are some references you may be interested in:

1. Two early articles

Pisoni, D. B., Aslin, R. N., Perey, A. J., & Hennessy, B. L. (1982). Some effects of laboratory training on identification and discrimination of voicing contrasts in stop consonants. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 8(2), 297-314.

Werker, T. (1984). Phonemic and phonetic factors in adult cross-language speech perception. JASA, 75(6).

2. Note that difference people have different preexisting prototypes. And the relation between the prototypes and the trained exemplars may affect the result of training.

Wayland, R. P., & Guion, S. G. (2004). Training English and Chinese listeners to perceive Thai tones: A preliminary report. Language Learning, 54(4), 681-712.

Francis, A. L., Ciocca, V., Ma, L., & Fenn, K. (2008). Perceptual learning of Cantonese lexical tones by tone and non-tone language speakers. Journal of Phonetics, 36(2), 268-294.

3. Additionally, talking about "prototype" & "criterion", it seems that the speech recognition feeding forward to lexical access can be biased by training:

McQueen, J. M., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (2006). Phonological abstraction in the mental lexicon. Cognitive Science, 30(6), 1113-1126. doi: 10.1207/s15516709cog0000_79

Mitterer, H., Chen, Y., & Zhou, X. (2011). Phonological Abstraction in Processing Lexical‐Tone Variation: Evidence From a Learning Paradigm. Cognitive Science, 35(1), 184-197. doi: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01140.x

I did find some studies that relate to this, particularly

Smith, J. D., & Minda, J. P. (1998). Prototypes in the mist: The early epochs of category

learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24(6),

1411-36.

and

Smith, J. D., Murray Jr, M. J., & Minda, J. P. (1997). Straight talk about linear separability.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23(3), 659-80.