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report of the findings would eventually be made available to the respondents. [Data for this 
study appear in Appendix E.] 
Results 
The analysis of the data for this study has been shaped by the limitations of the design, 
by the conservative standards required for cross-cultural comparisons, and by the relatively 
specific goals of the study. Typically, psycholinguistic semantic data on a set of related words 
are transformed into similarity or distance matrices and subjected to factor analysis, 
multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis, etc. (e.g. Coltheart & Evans, 1981; Friendly, 1977; 
Rapoport & Fillenbaum, 1972; Rudmin & Berry, 1987; Takane, 1980; Wagener & Pohl, 1986). For 
example, Study 2 used cluster analysis and factor analysis to examine the structure of a 
semantic similarity matrix. However, such analyses are too indeterminate for use without 
ancillary means of validation {Rapoport & Fillenbaum, 1972). For example in Study 2, the 
multivariate analysis of the verb similarity ratings was made tenable by the relatively large 
duplicate samples, by an existing psychological literature with which to relate the results and 
interpretations, and by the researcher having native-speaker command of the language. The 
present study had none of these advantages. 
There is the further uncertainty of cross-cultural comparison of two groups reported and 
hypothesized to be different in conceptualizations of ownership. Analyses must not presume 
equivalence of the multivariate structure of the data or of the linear scale units used by the 
respondents (Bijnen, Van Der Net & Poortinga, 1986; Malpass & Poortinga, 1986). Finally, the 
goal of the study was limited to uncovering differences, if any, in the meaning of own. It was 
not the goal of the study to describe the entire semantic space of ail the words of possession 
in Cree and English. Thus, the analyses of the data avoid multivariate explorations and rely on 
non-parametric statistics, which make minimal assumptions of linear equivalence between 
respondents’ responses. 
The respondents expressed their conceptions of the meaning of own on two 
unconstrained and two constrained psycholinguistic tasks. The constrained free-recall and the 
Rplanaiion of own to a child are considered to be “unconstrained” because respondents were 
not required to make semantic judgements on all 24 of the verbs under study and were free to 
introduce new verbs in their responses. The card sort and scaling tasks, on the other hand.