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The blowfish effect: children and adults use atypical exemplars to infer more narrow categories during word learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 July 2019

Lauren L. EMBERSON
Affiliation:
Princeton University, USA
Nicole LONCAR
Affiliation:
Princeton University, USA
Carolyn MAZZEI
Affiliation:
Princeton University, USA
Isaac TREVES
Affiliation:
Princeton University, USA
Adele E. GOLDBERG*
Affiliation:
Princeton University, USA
*
*Corresponding author: Princeton University, Psychology Department, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. E-mail: adele@princeton.edu

Abstract

Learners preferentially interpret novel nouns at the basic level (‘dog’) rather than at a more narrow level (‘Labrador’). This ‘basic-level bias’ is mitigated by statistics: children and adults are more likely to interpret a novel noun at a more narrow label if they witness ‘a suspicious coincidence’ – the word applied to three exemplars of the same narrow category. Independent work has found that exemplar typicality influences learners’ inferences and category learning. We bring these lines of work together to investigate whether the content (typicality) of a single exemplar affects the level of interpretation of words and whether an atypicality effect interacts with input statistics. Results demonstrate that both four- to five-year-olds and adults tend to assign a narrower interpretation to a word if it is exemplified by an atypical category member. This atypicality effect is roughly as strong as, and independent of, the suspicious coincidence effect, which is replicated.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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