The authors documented a linguistic norm account of direction of comparison asymmetry effects in relational judgments (e.g., seeing hyenas as more similar to dogs than dogs are similar to hyenas). The asymmetry effect is magnified by discrepancies in prominence between subject and reference, and has previously been explained using A. Tversky's (1977) feature-matching model. Given a linguistic norm to place more prominent objects in the referent position, violation of this norm might reduce sentence clarity, which then weakens the magnitude of subsequent relational judgments. 53 undergraduates completed a study that tested the degree to which both clarity and feature-matching predicted the magnitude of relational judgments by construction in 3 regression models, on for each of the 3 types of relation statements: similarity, difference, and spatial relation. Clarity perceptions predict the magnitude of relational judgments independently of the cognitive manipulation of the features of the compared objects. The pattern of findings suggests that a linguistic norm interpretation may account for variance in relational judgments independently of Tversky's feature-matching model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)