ABSTRACT
Cross-cultural studies of the psychology of word meaning are important for the light they may shed on the potential sociocultural, environmental, and linguistic factors involved in the development of word meanings in different cultural and language groups. There has been an explosion of research interest in the structure, process, and acquisition of word meanings and categories in the past 2 decades (see Markman, 1989; Medin & Smith, 1984, for reviews). During this relative explosion, however, cross-cultural psycholinguistic studies on the topic have been few and far between. The vast majority of studies investigating word meaning have employed English-speaking participants living in (sub)urban settings with above normal intelligence. From these studies some limited number of principles and factors have been discerned regarding how humans process, represent, and acquire the meanings of words. To the degree that other cultural or language groups have been ignored, we cannot be certain that the principles inferred from these studies present a balanced account of the factors engaged by word meaning processes.
