Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do all languages convey semantic knowledge in the same way?If language simply mirrors the structure of the world, theanswer should be a qualified “yes”. If, however, languagesimpose structure as much as reflecting it, then even ostensiblythe “same” word in different languages may mean quitedifferent things. We provide a first pass at a large-scalequantification of cross-linguistic semantic alignment ofapproximately 1000 meanings in 55 languages. We find thatthe translation equivalents in some domains (e.g., Time,Quantity, and Kinship) exhibit high alignment acrosslanguages while the structure of other domains (e.g., Politics,Food, Emotions, and Animals) exhibits substantial cross-linguistic variability. Our measure of semantic alignmentcorrelates with known phylogenetic distances betweenlanguages: more phylogenetically distant languages have lesssemantic alignment. We also find semantic alignment tocorrelate with cultural distances between societies speakingthe languages, suggesting a rich co-adaptation of language andculture even in domains of experience that appear mostconstrained by the natural world.