cognitive pluralism or individual differences: a comparison of alternative models of American English kin terms

This paper uses multidimensional scaling (MDS) to compare alternative models of kinship terms of American English. It thereby inquires into whether the same person can operate with alternative cognitive structures when the verbal context of the kinship terms is systematically modified by the presence (as in the Wallace‐Atkins model) or the absence (as in the Romney‐D'Andrade model) of an ego reference point. Our experiments also demonstrate unexpected discrepencies between the results of similarity tests with dyads and those with triads when the ego reference point is present.