Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Words carry affective connotations, but the role of these conno-tations in the representation of meaning is not well understood.Like other aspects of meaning, connotation might be cultureor language-specific. This study uses a large-scale relatednessjudgment task to determine the role of affective connotationsin concrete and abstract words in English, Rioplatense Span-ish, and Mandarin Chinese. Across languages, word valence,or how positive or negative a word is, was one of the main or-ganizing factors in both concrete and abstract concepts. More-over, predicted culture-specific affective connotations were re-liably found in the similarity space of abstract concepts. Afollow-up analysis was conducted to investigate whether distri-butional semantic representations derived from language simi-larly encodes these connotations using word embeddings. Thelanguage models did only partly captured the overall similaritystructure and the affective connotations shaping it.