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We can easily evaluate similarities between concepts within semantic domains, e.g., doctor and nurse, or violin and piano. Here, we show that people are also able to evaluate similarities across domains, e.g., aligning doctors with pianos and nurses with violins. We argue that understanding how people do this is important for understanding conceptual organization and the ubiquity of metaphorical language. We asked people to answer questions of the form "If a nurse were an animal, they would be a(n)…" (Experiment 1 and 2), and asked them to explain the basis for their response (Experiment 1). People converged to a surprising degree (e.g., 20% answered "cat"). In Experiment 3, we presented people with cross-domain mappings of the form "If a nurse were an animal, they would be a cat” and asked them to indicate how good each mapping was. The results showed that the targets people chose and their goodness ratings of a given response were predicted by similarity along abstract semantic dimensions such as valence, speed, and genderedness. Reliance on such dimensions was also the most common explanation for their responses. Altogether, we show that people can evaluate similarity between very different domains in predictable ways, suggesting that either seemingly concrete concepts are represented along relatively abstract dimensions (e.g., weak-strong) or that they can be readily projected onto these dimensions. 

This paper presents a systematic review of the empirical literature that uses dual-task interference methods for investigating the on-line involvement of language in various cognitive tasks. In these studies, participants perform some primary task X putatively recruiting linguistic resources while also engaging in a secondary, concurrent task. If performance on the primary task decreases under interference, there is evidence for language involvement in the primary task. We assessed studies (N = 101) reporting at least one experiment with verbal interference and at least one control task (either primary or secondary). We excluded papers with an explicitly clinical, neurological, or developmental focus. The primary tasks identified include categorization, memory, mental arithmetic, motor control, reasoning (verbal and visuospatial), task switching, theory of mind, visual change, and visuospatial integration and wayfinding. Overall, the present review found that internal language is likely to play a facilitative role in memory and categorization when items to be remembered or categorized have readily available labels, when inner speech can act as a form of behavioral self-cuing (inhibitory control, task set reminders, verbal strategy), and when inner speech is plausibly useful as “workspace,” for example, for mental arithmetic. There is less evidence for the role of internal language in cross-modal integration, reasoning relying on a high degree of visual detail or items low on nameability, and theory of mind. We discuss potential pitfalls and suggestions for streamlining and improving the methodology. 

We investigated how gender is represented in children’s books using a novel 200,000 word corpus comprising 247 popular, contemporary books for young children. Using human judgments and word co-occurrence data, we quantified gender biases of words in individual books and in the whole corpus. We find that children’s books contain many words that adults judge as gendered. Semantic analyses based on co-occurrence data yielded word clusters related to gender stereotypes (e.g., feminine: emotions; masculine: tools). Co-occurrence data also indicate that many books instantiate gender stereotypes identified in other research (e.g., girls are better at reading and boys at math). Finally, we used large-scale data to estimate the gender distribution of the audience for individual books, and find that children are more often exposed to gender stereotypes for their own gender. Together the data suggest that children’s books may be an early source of gender associations and stereotypes.