Learning new concepts and categories can occur both through demonstration of examples or verbal communication. However, verbal and nonverbal methods of communication are not interchangeable. When teaching perceptual categories, language allows to identify relevant features and transfer abstract rules, while examples help to associate verbal designations with specific perceptual features. Our study examines the communication of categorical knowledge from a "teacher" to a "student" using verbal, nonverbal, and combined communication methods. The results of the experiment showed that stimuli dimensionality (the number of mutable features) reduces the perceived and objective effectiveness of teaching by examples, but does not affect teaching by verbal explanations. In turn, the perceptual confusability of stimuli negatively affects the effectiveness of verbal communication, but does not affect nonverbal communication.