Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Speakers of two languages have access to two semantic systems that, while largely similar, may differ in subtleways. The existence of multiple similar systems offers the potential for comparison of their structures and discovery of thedifferences between them. We hypothesized that if bilinguals engage in such a comparison process, they may be (a) less likelythan monolinguals to view the categories of any single language as natural kinds, and (b) more likely than monolinguals todiscern differences among high-similarity items more generally. Monolingual and bilingual participants indicated their level ofagreement with statements equating social categories with natural kinds and judged the similarity of pairs of perceptual rela-tions. Compared to monolinguals, bilinguals were less willing to endorse naturalness statements and showed more variability intheir similarity judgments. These results suggest that bilingualism may promote sensitivity to differences among highly similarstimuli, linguistic and otherwise.