Abstract
This paper investigates whether an abstract linguistic construction shows the kind of prototype effects characteristic of non-linguistic categories, in both adults and young children. Adapting the prototype-plus-distortion methodology of Franks and Bransford (1971), we found that whereas adults were lured toward false-positive recognition of sentences with prototypical transitive semantics, young children showed no such effect. We examined two main implications of the results. First, it adds a novel data point to a growing body of research in cognitive linguistics and construction grammar that shows abstract linguistic categories can behave in similar ways to non-linguistic categories, for example, by showing graded membership of a category. Thus, the findings lend psychological validity to the existing cross-linguistic evidence for prototypical transitive semantics. Second, we discuss a possible explanation for the fact that prototypical sentences were processed differently in adults and children, namely, that children's transitive semantic network is not as interconnected or cognitively coherent as adults'. © 2012 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1268-1288 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Cognitive Science |
Volume | 36 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Sept 2012 |
Keywords
- Categorization
- Grammar
- Prototype
- Semantics