915 research outputs found
Normality: Part Descriptive, part prescriptive
People’s beliefs about normality play an important role in many aspects of cognition and life (e.g., causal cognition, linguistic semantics, cooperative behavior). But how do people determine what sorts of things are normal in the first place? Past research has studied both people’s representations of statistical norms (e.g., the average) and their representations of prescriptive norms (e.g., the ideal). Four studies suggest that people’s notion of normality incorporates both of these types of norms. In particular, people’s representations of what is normal were found to be influenced both by what they believed to be descriptively average and by what they believed to be prescriptively ideal. This is shown across three domains: people’s use of the word ‘‘normal” (Study 1), their use of gradable adjectives (Study 2), and their judgments of concept prototypicality (Study 3). A final study investigated the learning of normality for a novel category, showing that people actively combine statistical and prescriptive information they have learned into an undifferentiated notion of what is normal (Study 4). Taken together, these findings may help to explain how moral norms impact the acquisition of normality and, conversely, how normality impacts the acquisition of moral norms
Social Identity, Prototypes, and Exemplars in Gospel Narratives : Methodological Considerations
Peer reviewe
Directional asymmetries reveal a universal bias in adult vowel perception
published online 21 April 2017Research on cross-language vowel perception in both infants and adults has shown that for many
vowel contrasts, discrimination is easier when the same pair of vowels is presented in one direction
compared to the reverse direction. According to one account, these directional asymmetries
reflect a universal bias favoring “focal” vowels (i.e., vowels whose adjacent formants are close
in frequency, which concentrates acoustic energy into a narrower spectral region). An alternative,
but not mutually exclusive, account is that such effects reflect an experience-dependent
bias favoring prototypical instances of native-language vowel categories. To disentangle the
effects of focalization and prototypicality, the authors first identified a certain location in
phonetic space where vowels were consistently categorized as /u/ by both Canadian-English and
Canadian-French listeners, but that nevertheless varied in their stimulus goodness (i.e., the best
Canadian-French /u/ exemplars were more focal compared to the best Canadian-English /u/
exemplars). In subsequent AX discrimination tests, both Canadian-English and Canadian-French
listeners performed better at discriminating changes from less to more focal /u/’s compared to
the reverse, regardless of variation in prototypicality. These findings demonstrate a universal
bias favoring vowels with greater formant convergence that operates independently of biases
related to language-specific prototype categorization.This research was supported by NSERC Discovery
Grant No. 105397 to L.P. and NSERC Discovery Grant No.
312395 to L.M
Construction Learning as a Function of Frequency, Frequency Distribution, and Function
Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73472/1/j.1540-4781.2009.00896.x.pd
Typicality, graded membership, and vagueness
This paper addresses theoretical problems arising from the vagueness of language terms, and intuitions of the vagueness of the concepts to which they refer. It is argued that the central intuitions of prototype theory are sufficient to account for both typicality phenomena and psychological intuitions about degrees of membership in vaguely defined classes. The first section explains the importance of the relation between degrees of membership and typicality (or goodness of example) in conceptual categorization. The second and third section address arguments advanced by Osherson and Smith (1997), and Kamp and Partee (1995), that the two notions of degree of membership and typicality must relate to fundamentally different aspects of conceptual representations. A version of prototype theory—the Threshold Model—is proposed to counter these arguments and three possible solutions to the problems of logical selfcontradiction and tautology for vague categorizations are outlined. In the final section graded membership is related to the social construction of conceptual boundaries maintained through language use
The Processing of Verb-Argument Constructions is Sensitive to Form, Function, Frequency, Contingency, and Prototypicality.
Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139741/1/CognitiveLinguisticsUMichOffprint.pd
Forms and Frames: Mind, Morality, and Trust in Robots across Prototypical Interactions
People often engage human-interaction schemas in human-robot interactions, so notions of prototypicality are useful in examining how interactions’ formal features shape perceptions of social robots. We argue for a typology of three higher-order interaction forms (social, task, play) comprising identifiable-but-variable patterns in agents, content, structures, outcomes, context, norms. From that ground, we examined whether participants’ judgments about a social robot (mind, morality, and trust perceptions) differed across prototypical interactions. Findings indicate interaction forms somewhat influence trust but not mind or morality evaluations. However, how participants perceived interactions (independent of form) were more impactful. In particular, perceived task interactions fostered functional trust, while perceived play interactions fostered moral trust and attitude shift over time. Hence, prototypicality in interactions should not consider formal properties alone but must also consider how people perceive interactions according to prototypical frames
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