On domain differences in categorization and context variety

Verheyen, Steven; Heussen, Daniel; Storms, Gerrit

doi:10.3758/s13421-011-0102-3

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 39 publications

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“…The use of completely distinct criteria by different groups in the same language community would hamper their communication (Hampton & Passanisi, 2016; Verheyen & Storms, 2013). The consistency with which many items are used and the restricted range of contexts in which they are encountered might also make them less prone to differences (Verheyen, Heussen, & Storms, 2011).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-Related Degree and Criteria Differences in Semantic Categorization

Verheyen

Droeshout

Storms

2019

Journal of Cognition

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Individual differences in semantic categorization are commonplace. Individuals apply a word like SPORTS to different instances because they employ different conditions for category membership (vagueness in criteria) or because they differ regarding the extent to which they feel the term can be applied given fixed conditions (vagueness in degree). Three individuals may, for instance, disagree as to whether chess and hiking are SPORTS , because one believes SPORTS are competitive in nature, while the other two require SPORTS to be effortful (vagueness in criteria). On the basis of whether they consider hiking sufficiently effortful or not, the latter two individuals might still disagree as to whether to call it a SPORT (vagueness in degree). We investigated whether there are systematic age-related differences in semantic categorization by analyzing the categorization decisions of 1,868 adults for eight semantic categories with a formal model that allows the two sources of categorization differences to be disentangled. We found that young and older adults assess instances differently with respect to the categorization conditions and that older adults employ a lower threshold for category membership than young adults do. We recommend that these criteria and degree differences are taken into account in studies of age-related semantic processing.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-Related Degree and Criteria Differences in Semantic Categorization

Verheyen

Droeshout

Storms

2019

Journal of Cognition

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Discrete dimension accessibility in multidimensional concepts

Fadlon

Sassoon

Schumacher

2018

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Previous studies have identified that conceptual categories corresponding to nouns exhibit semantic domain effects: (1) classification into biological ones reflects a non-additive consideration of their defining dimensions whereas classification into artefactual and, presumably, social nouns is based on an additive one (2) nominal biological concepts are less graded than artifacts. Nevertheless, much uncertainty exists about the structure of conceptual categories corresponding to multidimensional adjectives. We propose that the effects observed for concepts corresponding to nouns are connected to a property we term discrete dimension accessibility and ask how it is manifested in multidimensional concepts corresponding to adjectives. We then hypothesize that (a) ratings of dimension-counting structures can be used as a diagnostic for these properties (b) the dimensions of multidimensional concepts corresponding to adjectives are inherently discrete. We report an acceptability rating experiment involving 42 adult Hebrew speakers revealing that with nouns, dimension-counting constructions with artefactual and social predicates are rated higher than ones with biological predicates, hence confirming (a). With adjectives, ratings for dimension-counting constructions remained high across the domain manipulation, hence confirming (b). We argue that the interaction between discrete dimension accessibility and lexical category indicates that lexical distinctions interact with conceptual ones.

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On domain differences in categorization and context variety

Cited by 2 publications

References 39 publications

Age-Related Degree and Criteria Differences in Semantic Categorization

Age-Related Degree and Criteria Differences in Semantic Categorization

Discrete dimension accessibility in multidimensional concepts

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