Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Languages commonly use physical properties to discuss dis-tinctly non-physical states and events in the world (e.g., “I’mnot a huge fan of licorice”). Here, we investigate the degreeto which associations between physical properties and abstractconcepts are culturally specific constructs. To do this, wetested three distinct populations—US adults, US children, andadults from an indigenous group in the lowlands of Bolivia, theTsimane’—on their associations between the physical conceptof weight and a variety of abstract attributes (e.g., importance,emotional state, moral worth). We find a strong relationshipbetween the associations of US and Tsimane’ adults, but little-to-no relationship between US children and either adult popu-lation. These results suggest that the property of weight playsa similar role in everyday thought across cultures, but that ittakes time to develop. Further, we found that these associationscould not be recovered from a simple semantic embeddinganalysis, suggesting that the cross-culturally shared connec-tions between physical and abstract attributes may be learnedthrough more complex experiences than language alone.