Gaps in the Lexicon Restrict Communication

Abstract

Across languages, words carve up the world of experience in different ways. For example, English lacks an equivalent to the Chinese superordinate noun tiáowèipǐn, which is loosely translated as “ingredients used to season food while cooking.” Do such differences matter? A conventional label may offer a uniquely effective way of communicating. On the other hand, lexical gaps may be easily bridged by the compositional power of language. After all, most of the ideas we want to express do not map onto simple lexical forms. We conducted a referential Director/Matcher communication task with adult speakers of Chinese and English. Directors provided a clue that Matchers used to select words from a word grid. The three target words corresponded to a superordinate term (e.g., beverages) in either Chinese or English but not both. We found that Matchers were more accurate at choosing the target words when their language lexicalized the target category. This advantage was driven entirely by the Directors’ use/non-use of the intended superordinate term. The presence of a conventional superordinate had no measurable effect on speakers’ within- or between-category similarity ratings. These results show that the ability to rely on a conventional term is surprisingly important despite the flexibility languages offer to communicate about non-lexicalized categories.

The Power of the Lexicon: Eliciting Superordinate Categories With and Without Labels

“…Second, we predict that responses will be less variable, and individuals will be better aligned with each other, given labels over exemplar lists or definitions. This prediction follows from research showing that labels help people align in communication (Rissman et al, 2023).…”

“…For example, speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese sort pictures of household containers in similar ways despite naming them in strikingly different ways (Malt, Sloman, Gennari, Shi, & Wang, 1999). Although Chinese lacks a superordinate term corresponding to the English word drugs (which includes both legal and illegal drugs), English speakers do not rate word pairs such as aspirin, cocaine as more similar than Chinese speakers do (Rissman, Liu, & Lupyan, 2023). Thus users of different languages have shared knowledge of conceptual/perceptual categories, even if these languages provide different sets of labels.…”

Lexical choice and word formation in a taboo game paradigm

“…Based on the popular board LEXICAL CHOICE IN A TABOO GAME PARADIGM 7 game Codenames, some studies present sets of words to speakers on which a subset of words (usually two or three) are marked as targets. The speakers' task is to refer to only the target words, but not to all other words of the set, using a single word (Kumar et al, 2021;Mills, 2020;Rissman et al, 2023;Shen et al, 2018). The recipients' task is then to identify the correct target words, and only the target words.…”