Anthropology : Romney

Culture consists of shared cognitive representations in the minds of individuals. This paper investigates the extent to which English speakers share the "same" semantic structure of English kinship terms. The semantic structure is defined as the arrangement of the terms relative to each other as represented in a metric space in which itemsjudged more similar are placed closer to each other than items judged as less similar. The cognitive representation of the semantic structure, residing in the mind of an individual, is measured by judged similarity tasks involving comparisons among terms. Using six independent measurements, from each of 122 individuals, correspondence analysis represents the data in a common multidimensional spatial representation. Judged by a variety of statistical procedures, the individuals in our sample share virtually identical cognitive representations of the semantic structure of kinship terms. This model of culture accounts for 70-90% of the total variability in these data. We argue that our findings on kinship should generalize to all semantic domains-e.g., animals, emotions, etc. The investigation of semantic domains is important because they may reside in localized functional units in the brain, because they relate to a variety of cognitive processes, and because they have the potential to provide methods for diagnosing individual breakdowns in the structure of cognitive representations typical of such ailments as Alzheimer disease. Recent methodological advances make possible precise comparisons among cognitive representations in the minds of different individuals (1-3). We can now measure with known accuracy the extent to which "pictures" or cognitive representations in the mind of one person correspond to those in the mind of another. Not only can we measure the extent to which a large number of individuals "share" the same picture, but we can make multiple measures of the picture in the mind of a single individual. The picture in the mind of a single individual may be thought of as a representation.of the structure of some semantic domain such as kinship terms. A semantic domain may be defined as an organized set of words, all on the same level of contrast, that refer to a single conceptual category, such as fish, furniture, or vehicles (4). (Note that a semantic domain does not include the term for the superordinate category.) The structure of a semantic domain is defined as the arrangement of the terms relative to each other as represented in some metric system, such as Euclidean space, and described as a set of interpoint distances reflecting the dissimilarity between them. In this space, items that are judged more similar are closer to each other than items that are judged less similar. Semantic domains may be localized functional units in the brain. Neuropsychological studies have shown that aphasic patients sometimes have selective impairment of specific semantic categories such as flowers, vegetables, or animals (5-9). The concept of semantic structure also appears in investigations of Alzheimer and Huntington diseases, where there is a breakdown of semantic structure as well as a deterioration of its accessibility (10, 11). The structure of a semantic domain may be interpreted as a cognitive representation derived from judged-similarity tasks. This paper demonstrates how such measurements are made and discusses the reliability of these scaled representations. An important assumption is that the resulting spatial cognitive representation is, in some sense, isomorphic with what is in the mind of the subject (12). If this assumption is correct, then the representation should predict a variety of cognitive processes. Distances in such models have been shown to predict categorical judgment time (13-15), completion of analogies (14, 16), the strength of semantic clustering in memory (4), and response times in solving triadic comparison problems (17, 18). These findings illustrate the usefulness of these representations in cognitive science and the potential for their wider application in anthropology and other behavioral sciences. We note that the evolution of language and cultural knowledge, including all of scientific knowledge, is totally dependent upon the sharing of linguistic meanings. The learning of these shared meanings by individuals as members of human groups is a highly selected-for human survival skill transmitted from generation to generation. This view is consistent with the new developments in the field of evolutionary psychology (19). It is assumed, then, that each individual has an internal cognitive representation of the semantic structure in which the meaning of a term is defined by its location relative to all the other terms. Culture consists of shared cognitive representations of this structure. Our aim here is to measure the extent to which a number of individuals share cognitive representations and to identify any systematic differences of representations among subgroups of subjects. Kinship was chosen as the semantic domain for analysis because it is purely cultural in content. Kin terms are abstract concepts; they cannot be characterized in terms of obvious external physical characteristics or as occupying a single visible location. Kin terms have no "concrete" referents, such as size or color, in the way an animal such as "dog" or "cat" has. Different societies have very different ways of categorizing relatives; the English system is only one of many. For example, in English the categories of "mother" and "mother's sister" are distinguished by separate terms (i.e., mother and aunt), whereas in many societies "mother's sister" is called by the same term as "mother." Abbreviation: BIBD, balanced incomplete block design. *To whom reprint requests should be addressed. The publication costs of this article were defrayed in part by page charge payment. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 U.S.C. §1734 solely to indicate this fact.