Is jellyfish more of a fish in English than in Dutch? The effect of informative labels.

Some words are lexically suggestive about the taxonomic position of their referent (e.g., jellyfish in English), and this information can vary across languages (e.g., in Dutch the equivalent of jellyfish holds no taxonomic information: kwal). To evaluate the role of such lexical suggestions, we conducted a cross-linguistic study in which similarity judgements from two language groups (Dutch and English speakers) were compared. We paired asymmetrically informative items with items that are considered to be typical members of the referenced category (e.g., jellyfish-salmon). Our analyses revealed that items were deemed more similar by speakers of a language in which the lexical information was present (e.g., English speakers tended to give relatively higher ratings for jellyfish-salmon than Dutch participants did for the non-informative equivalent kwal-zalm). Results are discussed in light of theories of concept representation and compound processing.