The role of familiarity in determining typicality

Abstract

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 ...

Associative and similarity-based processes in categorization decisions

“…By including mean rated familiarity for each item in the analysis, McCloskey's suggestion can be rigorously tested in the case of the categorization times measured here. (Other effects of familiarity were reported by Glass & Meany, 1978, Larochelle & Pineau, 1994, and Malt & Smith, 1982 Finally, regression analysis was also applied to the correct response rates (or more specifically to the probability of a positive category decisionj' for individual instances in the 12 categories. Negative responses resulting from a failure to retrieve an "is a" link may be expected to be associated with low PF, whereas those owing to low featural similarity should be associated with low typicality.…”

Natural sources of internal category structure: Typicality, familiarity, and similarity of birds

“…This indicates that much of the apparent explanatory power of the label and token frequency measures in the overall analysis stems from the contrast between birds that the individuals encounter either in books or in the environment and those that they do not; the former are judged as more typical than the latter. This is the response bias referred to above (Malt & Smith, 1982). Among birds encountered both in the natural world and in the written word, variation in the number of instances of the birds has no effect on typicality judgments.…”

“…They found that unfamiliar atypical items have faster RTs than familiar atypical items, indicating that familiarity is not the only determinant of RT. Malt and Smith (1982) showed that part ofthe reason for Ashcraft's (1978) result was a response bias to assign low typicality ratings to unfamiliar words. They, like Hampton and Gardiner (1983), concluded that familiarity is not the crucial variable in determining typicality.…”

Similarity-based categorization and fuzziness of natural categories

“…Familiarity is known to play a role in how people rate typicality (Barsalou, 1985;Hampton and Gardiner, 1983;Malt and Smith, 1982;McCloskey, 1980). When items are unfamiliar they are normally given lower typicality ratings.…”