Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment

Thomson, Bill, Roberts, Sean G. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5990-9161 and Lupyan, Gary 2020. Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment. Nature Human Behaviour 4 , pp. 1029-1038. 10.1038/s41562-020-0924-8

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Abstract

If the structure of language vocabularies mirrors the structure of natural divisions that are universally perceived, then the meanings of words in different languages should closely align. By contrast, if shared word meanings are a product of shared culture, history and geography, they may differ between languages in substantial but predictable ways. Here, we analysed the semantic neighbourhoods of 1,010 meanings in 41 languages. The most-aligned words were from semantic domains with high internal structure (number, quantity and kinship). Words denoting natural kinds, common actions and artefacts aligned much less well. Languages that are more geographically proximate, more historically related and/or spoken by more-similar cultures had more aligned word meanings. These results provide evidence that the meanings of common words vary in ways that reflect the culture, history and geography of their users.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Nature Publishing Group
ISSN:	2397-3374
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	24 July 2020
Date of Acceptance:	2 July 2020
Last Modified:	13 Nov 2024 07:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/133694

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