These studies address monolinguals' and bilinguals' categories processing, in order to explore the relationship between concepts and linguistically encoded classes. This inquiry centers on languages that diverge in their conceptual lexicalization and width of application, where one language has a single word (e.g., dedo in Spanish) that corresponds to two words in another language (e.g., English finger and toe). Categories diverged across types of semantics-concept mappings, from ‘classical’ cases, covering members close in the conceptual space, to ‘homonyms’, covering conceptually remote items. Bilingual Catalan speakers, and English and Spanish monolinguals evaluated whether objects were ‘like’ an initial referent proposed either with or without a label. Scores were highest in classical categories, lowest in homonyms; higher in narrow than broad categories; and better in labeled than unlabeled cases. Bilinguals surpassed monolinguals in evaluations that conformed with their language, particularly in broad categories. Implications for the semantics-cognition interface and bilingualism are debated.