Bilinguals were trained to press a reaction-time button to those words in a mixed-language (English and French) list which were not exemplars of a certain general concept while learning to recognize which words were. They were then tested on a new mixed-language list containing English and French synonyms of the concept, unrelated words, as well as the original training exemplars of the concept. Reaction latencies were used as indices of within- and between-language semantic generalization. It was found that: ( a ) all S s generalized their responses significantly to both within-language and other-language synonyms; ( b ) in screening words for membership in the special category, S s found that the semantic properties of each test word provided a more important clue than did the language of the test word; and ( c ) the semantic properties of test words played a more important role for coordinate than for compound bilinguals.