Some verbal materials for the study of concept formation.

Underwood, Benton J.; Richardson, Jack

doi:10.1037/h0047383

Cited by 135 publications

(62 citation statements)

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“…Moreover, it is hard to converse about events on the basis of their properties if different people represent the same event according to different properties-for example, what is fast to one person may be loud to another. (The lack of consensus by Underwood & Richardson's, 1956, participants suggests this may be the case.) This too would be a disincentive to encode event properties.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, enumeration strategies are associated with underestimation at all levels of frequency, and nonnumerical strategies, such as those involving general impressions, are associated with overestimation, especially at higher levels of frequency. Because the implicit property group relied predominantly on simple enumeration, we would expect them to underestimate, relative to normative values (Underwood & Richardson, 1956), across all levels of frequency. However, Barsalou and Ross (1986) and Freund and Hasher (1989) observed pronounced regression effects-low-end overestimation and high-end underestimation-among participants whose task resembled that of our implicit property group.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is possible that the low hit rate for the implicit property group actually involved recall of some study items that the participants encoded as instances of the test property but that, on the basis of the Underwood and Richardson (1956) norms, we did not classify this way. Nonetheless, the lack of impression-based strategies in this group suggests that their performance is not just the result of disagreement about the pairing of instances and properties.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, in the Underwood and Richardson (1956) norms, GREEN was most often elicited by words such as spinach and ivy but was also associated (second most often) with lizard; in fact, the sense impression most often associated with lizard was SLIMY, which was the test property we used. By selecting the most frequently associated sense impressions as the test properties in the present study, we intended to choose properties that, if people encode any properties when they study the nouns, it would be these.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As was indicated above, this is less straightforward in the case of properties, where many words may be good examples of more than one property, than in the case of taxonomic categories. The associations between instances and properties were based on a set of norms published by Underwood and Richardson (1956) for 213 ordinary nouns. They asked participants to provide a "sense impression" of each noun, where sense impression was defined as the response "one might use to describe an object upon seeing it for the first time" (p. 86).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Estimating the frequency of events from unnatural categories

2003

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We report two experiments about how people estimate the frequency of event properties when they are explicitly (e.g., spinach-GREEN) and implicitly (e.g., spinach) presented. In Experiment 1, verbal reports indicated that, for explicitly presented properties, participants used several retrieval-and impressionbased strategiesand were relatively accurate. Implicitly presented properties led to off-target retrieval, which brought to mind more instances of nontarget than of target properties and degraded estimates. A third group estimated the frequency of taxonomic categories (e.g., furniture) much as the explicit property group did, suggesting that people can use properties to organize remembered events. In a second experiment, estimation time patterns underscored the results of Experiment 1 and eliminated reactive verbal reports as an explanation. Off-target retrieval was both ineffective and slow.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Estimating the frequency of events from unnatural categories

2003

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Stimulus modes and language media: A study of bilinguals

1970

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Traditional approaches in the study of concepts fall into two categories: (a) linguistic analysis, which investigates the already formed concepts of the subjects through verbal definition of their contents while ignoring the dynamics of concept formation, and (b) psych.ological analysis, which is concerned with the study of the psychological processes leading to formation of concepts while disregarding the role played by the verbal symbol in the process. However, there has been a trend in recent research towards integration of the aspects studied independently in the traditional categories. This psycholinguistic analysis no longer separates verbal symbols from the perceptual process in concept formation. Carroll (1958), Vygotsky (1962, and Underwood (1952), among others, have presented theoretical discussions of psycholinguistics, while Goss (1961aGoss ( , 1961b, Staats (1961), and Underwood and Richardson (1956a, 195613) have provided some examples of the psycholinguistic research dealing with concept formation.Numerous applications are feasible of such an approach to educational problems, most of which involve the formation and transmission of concepts via the medium of language. One example is the recent studies on the relationships between the stimulus modes (aural, visual, etc.) and the association responses (Bourisseau, Davis, & Yamamoto, 1965; Otto, 1962 Otto, , 1964 Otto & Britton, 1964) which seem to have a direct bearing on, among other things, the audio-visual instructional methods.Otto's earlier studies (1962, 1964) seemed to support the generally accepted principle that pictures have more sensory appeal than do printed words. However, a later, more systematic investigation by Otto and Britton (1964) revealed that the verbal (printed) mode of presentation evoked a significantly higher proportion of sense-impression responses than did the pictorial mode. A replication study by Bourisseau, Davis, and Yamamoto (1965) supported the Otto-Britton results and suggested a further examination of the influence of stimulus modes in teaching-learning processes.The fact that the mode of presentation of the same information seems to elicit different responses immediately invites the question whether such findings are a function of a specific language used as the transmission medium. If the same results, namely, the verbal (printed) mode eliciting a higher proportion of sense-impression responses than the pictorial mode, are obtained across different languages, the phenomenon obviously involves some central processes transcendent of the particular carriers of information. The present study tried to explore this possibility by employing bilinguals as subjects. PROCEDURE SubjectsEleven English-Spanish bilinguals participated in the study. The small number of subjects wm due to absence in the area of such bilingual individuals at the particular educational level desired for this study. The subjects were to be college students who were at least beyond their second year.

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A New Approach to the Study of Verbal Concept Learning1

Snyder¹,

Hale

1971

ETS Research Bulletin Series

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A total of 71 adults were given a concept learning problem containing verbal statements as stimuli. A conjunctive‐category procedure was used with statements differing on 5 “dimensions,” defined as Noun‐Pronoun Subject, Gender of Subject, Tense of Verb, Sense of Verb and Locus of Activity. Performance was assessed as a function of (a) the combination of two dimensions chosen to be relevant (3 combinations) and (b) the number of irrelevant dimensions (1 versus 3). An overall analysis of variance indicated the interaction between these variables to be significant at the .05 level. Analyses of simple effects showed that, when 3 dimensions were irrelevant, variation in sentence meaning (Sense of Verb, Locus of Activity) was more easily detected as relevant than grammatical variation in a single word (Gender of Subject, Noun‐Pronoun Subject). Performance under 3 irrelevant dimensions was found to be superior to that under 1 irrelevant dimension for the relevant‐dimension combination Gender of Subject‐Sense of Verb, suggesting that the effects of irrelevant variation in the present task may be more complex than in a figural concept learning problem.

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Some verbal materials for the study of concept formation.

Cited by 135 publications

References 1 publication

Estimating the frequency of events from unnatural categories

Estimating the frequency of events from unnatural categories

Stimulus modes and language media: A study of bilinguals

A New Approach to the Study of Verbal Concept Learning1

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