ERIC Number: EJ1224530
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2019-Sep
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
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The Blowfish Effect: Children and Adults Use Atypical Exemplars to Infer More Narrow Categories during Word Learning
Emberson, Lauren L.; Loncar, Nicole; Mazzei, Carolyn; Treves, Isaac
Journal of Child Language, v46 n5 p938-954 Sep 2019
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.
Descriptors: Vocabulary Development, Nouns, Language Processing, Inferences, Classification, Linguistic Input, Young Children, Adults, Comparative Analysis, Concept Formation, Linguistic Theory
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
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Language: English
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