Relationships among goodness-of-example, category norms, and word frequency

Mervis, Carolyn Β.; Catlin, Jack; Rosch, Eleanor

doi:10.3758/bf03337190

Cited by 161 publications

(143 citation statements)

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“…The frequency of production of a word depends on many factors besides the typicality of the entity to which the word refers (e.g., frequency, familiarity), though there is a correlation between production and rating norms (Mervis, Catlin, & Rosch, 1976). When Kelly et al (1986) found that typicality as measured by production frequency affected word order, it is not clear that the effect was caused only by category typicality.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Prototypicality in sentence production

Onishi

Murphy

Bock

2008

Cognitive Psychology

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Three cued-recall experiments examined the effect of category typicality on the ordering of words in sentence production. Past research has found that typical items tend to be mentioned before atypical items in a phrase-a pattern usually associated with lexical variables (like word frequency), and yet typicality is a conceptual variable. Experiment 1 revealed that an appropriate conceptual framework was necessary to yield the typicality effect. Experiment 2 tested ad-hoc categories that do not have prior representations in long-term memory and yielded no typicality effect. Experiment 3 used carefully matched sentences in which two category members appeared in the same or in different phrases. Typicality affected word order only when the two words appeared in the same phrase. These results are consistent with an account in which typicality has its origin in conceptual structure, which leads to differences in lexical accessibility in appropriate contexts.When people talk, the order of their words matters: Lee inspired Pat does not mean the same thing as Pat inspired Lee. How do people decide which words to say first? The syntax of English provides one constraint, as some words need to be the subject or object, given the meaning to be communicated. But English sometimes provides alternative ways to convey approximately the same meaning. For example, English allows us to say Lee inspired Pat and Pat was inspired by Lee. Passive sentences differ in structure and word order, but they provide the same basic information as the corresponding actives. Options may also differ in word order alone. Saying either Please bring some apples and kiwis to the party or Please bring some kiwis and apples to the party would probably lead to the same outcome (two sorts of fruit at the event), even though the order of words is different. In this article, we examine the factors that affect word order when order matters to sentence structure and whether those factors are the same when order does not greatly affect structure.One principle determining word order is that things that are easier to say tend to get said earlier (Bock, 1982). There are at least two ways in which things can be easier to say: It can be easier to access the concept, or it can be easier to access the word that refers to the concept (Bock, 1987a;Clark & Clark, 1977). Both of these factors, called respectively conceptual and lexical accessibility, have been shown to affect the ordering of words in sentences (Bock, 1977; 1987a,b;Bock & Irwin, 1980;Bock & Warren, 1985;Kelly, Bock, & Keil, 1986; Please address all correspondence to: Gregory L. Murphy, Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, 8th floor, New York, NY 10003, gregory.murphy@nyu.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it i...

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Prototypicality in sentence production

Onishi

Murphy

Bock

2008

Cognitive Psychology

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“…The exact relationship between typicality (E. E. Smith et aI., 1974) and instance dominance (Battig & Montague, 1969;Casey, 1992;Chumbley, 1986) is uncertain, although it has been shown that these two variables are correlated (Gruenenfelder, 1986;Larochelle & Pineau, 1994;Mervis, Catlin, & Rosch, 1976).…”

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confidence: 99%

On the continuity of thought and the representation of knowledge: Electrophysiological and behavioral time-course measures reveal levels of structure in semantic memory

Kounios¹

1996

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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Time-coursestudies of semantic verification are reviewed, discussed, and reinterpreted with the aim of drawing general theoretical conclusions about semantic memory structure. These reaction time, speed-accuracy tradeoff, speed-accuracy decomposition, and event-related (brain) potential (ERP) studies suggest that semantic memory is structured on at least three levels. In particular, specific models of the intermediate (macrostructural) level are discussed and compared. ERP investigations of this level suggest that context-independent and context-dependent types of semantic information are potentially isolable and analyzable.Research on semantic memory has been one of the mainstays of cognitive psychology for more than two decades. Since the early papers of Collins and Quillian (1969) and Meyer (1970), the focus of this research has been on exploring how people represent, access, and utilize semantic information about natural categories. Of these interests, the representation of semantic information has been the primary concern. Indeed, the investigations of the 1970s pioneered the use ofa number ofideas that have proved important to the study ofknowledge representation, such as networks, features, exemplars, fuzzy sets, and so on (for reviews, see Chang, 1986; Kintsch, 1980;E. E. Smith, 1978). Experimental ApproachThe basic experimental approach taken by this body of work is, in principle, simple. Subjects are presented with pairs of terms representing common concepts, usually in the form of a sentence (e.g., "All dogs are animals," or "Some people are trees"). Insuch a sentence verification task, subjects must quickly decide whether the semantic relation given by each sentence is correct or incorrect and respond to each stimulus with a rapid, accurate buttonpress to indicate their decision. Since the sentences are typically rather simple, accuracy is usually high. So, reaction time (RT) has been the dependent variable of primary interest.The preparation of this article was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant CEP 1 R29 MH45447-01A3 to 1.K. Thanks go to Jane Anderson, Phillip 1. Holcomb, James Neely, Allen Osman, Richard Schweickert, Roderick Smith, and various anonymous reviewers for helpful discussions, advice, and comments. RationaleThe logic of this enterprise is straightforward. It was hoped that comparing mean RTs to syntactically similar sentences embodying different semantic relations between the subject and predicate terms would allow inferences to be made about the format and organization of information in semantic memory. This is a different approach from that taken by most researchers in the field of categorization. These researchers have usually adopted a variety of rating andjudgment tasks to study how people form and utilize different types of concepts (for a recent review, see Komatsu, 1992). The latter approach has the advantage of reflecting how people learn and use categories. The drawback is that it is difficult to infer in this way the structure or format of this knowle...

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“…Mervis, Catlin, and Rosch (1976), for example, found no correlation between Kucera and Francis (I 967) word frequency and rated typicality for members of common categories. Rosch, Simpson, and Miller (1976) demonstrated that when frequency of presentation was manipulated for members of artificial categories, typicality ratings reflected structural variables rather than frequency.…”

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confidence: 99%

The role of familiarity in determining typicality

1982

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Ashcraft (l978b) found that people tend to know more properties of instances they rate as typical of a category than of instances they rate as atypical. This suggests that variations in typicality result from variations in familiarity. Three experiments are presented that challenge or qualify this suggestion. Experiment 1 showed that subjects sometimes produce more properties for items they rate as low in typicality. Experiment 2 showed that in a large, random sample of items, there was a tendency to produce fewer properties for atypical items, but Experiment 3 indicated that part of the reason for this result was a response bias to assign low typicality ratings to unfamiliar words, rather than a reflection of low perceived typicality of the referents themselves. These results suggest that variations in typicality can exist independent of variations in familiarity, although familiarity may also playa role.All members of a semantic category are not equally representative or typical of that category: A peach is a more typical fruit than a pomegranate, and a robin is a more typical bird than a roadrunner. By now it is well established that subjects show strong agreement in their ratings of how typical members of semantic categories are. It is also well established that rated typicality predicts performance in a wide variety of tasks, such as reaction time to verify category membership, order of learning by children, and order and probability of output in free listing to category names (Mervis & Rosch, 1981; Rips, Shoben, & Smith, 1973; Rosch, 1975; Rosch & Mervis, 1975). Understanding what determines typicality is thus a step toward understanding the principles by which information in semantic memory is acquired and organized.Most explanations of typicality have focused on the property structure ofcategories, examining the properties of the category members or those of the category itself (e.g., Rosch & Mervis, 1975; Smith, Shoben, & Rips, 1974). Rosch and Mervis, for example, suggested that typicality is based on the distribution of properties among category members. Typical members have properties that are common to many category members, and atypical members have properties that are common to few category members. In support of this proposal, they found a strong correlation between typicality ratings and family resemblance scores, a measure of overlap of an exemplar's properties with the properties of other category members.An alternative to a structural account, however, is aThis research was supported, in part, by U.S. Public Health Service Grant MH-19705. Requests for reprints should be sent to Barbara C. Malt, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305. We thank Kathy Hemenway, Larry Barsalou, and Greg Murphy for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. E. E. Smith is now at Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts.familiarity-based explanation of typicality. Most college students encounter peaches more often than pomegranates and robins more often ...

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Relationships among goodness-of-example, category norms, and word frequency

Cited by 161 publications

References 7 publications

Prototypicality in sentence production

Prototypicality in sentence production

On the continuity of thought and the representation of knowledge: Electrophysiological and behavioral time-course measures reveal levels of structure in semantic memory

The role of familiarity in determining typicality

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