IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nat/nathum/v4y2020i10d10.1038_s41562-020-0924-8.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment

Author

Listed:
  • Bill Thompson

    (Princeton University)

  • Seán G. Roberts

    (Cardiff University
    University of Bristol)

  • Gary Lupyan

    (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Abstract

If the structure of language vocabularies mirrors the structure of natural divisions that are universally perceived, then the meanings of words in different languages should closely align. By contrast, if shared word meanings are a product of shared culture, history and geography, they may differ between languages in substantial but predictable ways. Here, we analysed the semantic neighbourhoods of 1,010 meanings in 41 languages. The most-aligned words were from semantic domains with high internal structure (number, quantity and kinship). Words denoting natural kinds, common actions and artefacts aligned much less well. Languages that are more geographically proximate, more historically related and/or spoken by more-similar cultures had more aligned word meanings. These results provide evidence that the meanings of common words vary in ways that reflect the culture, history and geography of their users.

Suggested Citation

  • Bill Thompson & Seán G. Roberts & Gary Lupyan, 2020. "Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 4(10), pages 1029-1038, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:nat:nathum:v:4:y:2020:i:10:d:10.1038_s41562-020-0924-8
    DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-0924-8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0924-8
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1038/s41562-020-0924-8?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. van Loon, Austin, 2022. "Three Families of Automated Text Analysis," SocArXiv htnej, Center for Open Science.
    2. Michela Giorcelli & Nicola Lacetera & Astrid Marinoni, 2022. "How does scientific progress affect cultural changes? A digital text analysis," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 27(3), pages 415-452, September.
    3. Motoki, Kosuke & Pathak, Abhishek, 2022. "Articulatory global branding: Generalizability, modulators, and mechanisms of the in-out effect in non-WEIRD consumers," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 149(C), pages 231-239.
    4. Pol van Rijn & Pauline Larrouy-Maestri, 2023. "Modelling individual and cross-cultural variation in the mapping of emotions to speech prosody," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 7(3), pages 386-396, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nat:nathum:v:4:y:2020:i:10:d:10.1038_s41562-020-0924-8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nature.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.