The aim of this research is to analyze how people of different cultures exhibit similar understandings of the meanings of words in particular semantic domains such as emotions. Using an interview technique developed in cognitive science that elicits judgments of similarity between terms, and produces multidimensional maps of similarity-distance of terms, the project will elicit data from a range of respondents in different languages and cultural contexts (bi-lingual English-Japanese Japanese students in the US as well as in Japan, Chinese respondents from Taiwan in China and in the US, as well as other non-Indo-European language speakers). The study will examine the changes in the patterns of similarity meanings elicited from respondents with varying degrees of multiple-language use, from monolingual to fully bilingual speakers. The technique used will allow the PI to estimate the proportion of variation that is culturally specific as compared with variation due to universal patterns and individual characteristics. The role of gender in predicting this semantic domain structure will also be examined. The significance of this project is that it will advance our understanding of the extent of universal features in semantic domains, as well as provide new methods for the discovery of patterns of meaning in linguistic terms. The findings will contribute to an understanding of the extent to which there is an underlying `psychic unity` among all human cultures.
