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Prototypicality, distinctiveness, and intercorrelation: analyses of the semantic attributes of living and nonliving concepts

Prototypicality, distinctiveness, and intercorrelation: analyses of the semantic attributes of living and nonliving concepts
Prototypicality, distinctiveness, and intercorrelation: analyses of the semantic attributes of living and nonliving concepts
Many cognitive psychological, computational, and neuropsychological approaches to the organisation of semantic memory have incorporated the idea that concepts are, at least partly, represented in terms of their fine-grained features. We asked 20 normal volunteers to provide properties of 64 concrete items, drawn from living and nonliving categories, by completing simple sentence stems (e.g., an owl is __, has __, can__). At a later date, the same participants rated the same concepts for prototypicality and familiarity. The features generated were classified as to type of knowledge (sensory, functional, or encyclopaedic), and also quantified with regard to both dominance (the number of participants specifying that property for that concept) and distinctiveness (the proportion of exemplars within a conceptual category of which that feature was considered characteristic). The results demonstrate that rated prototypicality is related to both the familiarity of the concept and its distance from the average of the exemplars within the same category (the category centroid). The feature database was also used to replicate, resolve, and extend a variety of previous observations on the structure of semantic representations. Specifically, the results of our analyses (1) resolve two conflicting claims regarding the relative ratio of sensory to other kinds of attributes in living vs. nonliving concepts; (2) offer new information regarding the types of features - across different domains - that distinguish concepts from their category coordinates; and (3) corroborate some previous claims of higher intercorrelations between features of living things than those of artefacts.
0264-3294
125-174
Garrard, P.
4815434c-b90e-4998-934b-794c741eea76
Lambon Ralph, M.A.
3e0b212a-7b29-4c1d-bc99-cd64f9edf3d9
Hodges, J.R.
c17af0a9-82e7-4f5a-8a97-d50ec06bbb0a
Patterson, K.
9f16a321-0329-4d02-8c66-8808072110ae
Garrard, P.
4815434c-b90e-4998-934b-794c741eea76
Lambon Ralph, M.A.
3e0b212a-7b29-4c1d-bc99-cd64f9edf3d9
Hodges, J.R.
c17af0a9-82e7-4f5a-8a97-d50ec06bbb0a
Patterson, K.
9f16a321-0329-4d02-8c66-8808072110ae

Garrard, P., Lambon Ralph, M.A., Hodges, J.R. and Patterson, K. (2001) Prototypicality, distinctiveness, and intercorrelation: analyses of the semantic attributes of living and nonliving concepts. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 18 (2), 125-174. (doi:10.1080/02643290125857).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Many cognitive psychological, computational, and neuropsychological approaches to the organisation of semantic memory have incorporated the idea that concepts are, at least partly, represented in terms of their fine-grained features. We asked 20 normal volunteers to provide properties of 64 concrete items, drawn from living and nonliving categories, by completing simple sentence stems (e.g., an owl is __, has __, can__). At a later date, the same participants rated the same concepts for prototypicality and familiarity. The features generated were classified as to type of knowledge (sensory, functional, or encyclopaedic), and also quantified with regard to both dominance (the number of participants specifying that property for that concept) and distinctiveness (the proportion of exemplars within a conceptual category of which that feature was considered characteristic). The results demonstrate that rated prototypicality is related to both the familiarity of the concept and its distance from the average of the exemplars within the same category (the category centroid). The feature database was also used to replicate, resolve, and extend a variety of previous observations on the structure of semantic representations. Specifically, the results of our analyses (1) resolve two conflicting claims regarding the relative ratio of sensory to other kinds of attributes in living vs. nonliving concepts; (2) offer new information regarding the types of features - across different domains - that distinguish concepts from their category coordinates; and (3) corroborate some previous claims of higher intercorrelations between features of living things than those of artefacts.

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Published date: March 2001

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 48418
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/48418
ISSN: 0264-3294
PURE UUID: 569ffd4a-5d7f-4ac1-bac6-e4e424d98dc6

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Date deposited: 21 Sep 2007
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 09:45

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Contributors

Author: P. Garrard
Author: M.A. Lambon Ralph
Author: J.R. Hodges
Author: K. Patterson

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