Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present a general framework for capturing categorical cross-linguistic transfer effects – the influences of linguistic and con-ceptual categories in a bilingual speaker’s languages on eachother. By formulating the phenomenon as an instance of cogni-tive category shift, we achieve a general method for investigat-ing the extent and causes of crosslinguistic transfer in terms ofa category similarity space and a set of weighting factors. Weapply the model to the well-understood domain of color, formu-lating transfer as the modulation of conceptual color categoriesin one language on those of the other language. We analyze thecomponents of the model that predict salient aspects of humandata on an observed transfer effect in a range of languages.