Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How similar are people's meanings of common words? Do differences in word meanings lead to miscommunication? We examined divergence between word meanings using similarity ratings such as "Is a penguin more similar to a chicken or a dolphin". We found that given the identical instructions some people prioritized taxonomic relationships more than other people. Moreover, this taxonomic bias generalized from animals to artifacts suggesting a more general difference in semantic organization. When people with different biases are paired in a matcher-director type task, they were less likely to achieve communicative success.