Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People often categorize the world in absolutes, believing that certain words demarcate categories with discrete boundaries.This belief in category discretenessa signature of psychological essentialismstands in contrast to the observation that cate-gory boundaries differ markedly across languages. Here we show that learning about such semantic diversity via analogicalcomparison reduces the tendency to think of categories in discrete terms. Participants who compared contrasting categoriesfrom different languages in several semantic domains were less likely to endorse statements about category discretenessthan those exposed to the same categories separately or those in a no-exposure control group. These results suggest thatcomparing the semantic systems of different languages, and thereby discerning alignable differences between them, canfacilitate more flexible conceptions of categories. To the extent that cross-language comparison occurs spontaneously inindividuals with access to more than one semantic system, such conceptual flexibility may be a natural consequence ofbilingualism.