The abstraction of form in semantic categories

Abstract

Undergraduates were asked to generate a name for a hypothetical new exemplar of a category. They produced names that had the same numbers of syllables, the same endings, and the same types of word stems as existing exemplars of that category. In addition, novel exemplars, each consisting of a nonsense syllable root and a prototypical ending, were accurately assigned to categories. The data demonstrate the abstraction and use of surface properties of words.What types of organization do people use when they learn, categorize, or remember? For simple visual stimuli, such as patterns of dots varying randomly around a geometric pattern (Posner & Keele, 1968), people make use of whatever regularity exists. In contrast, for linguistic material, in which meaning can be more easily separated from form, psychologists have provided considerable evidence that people abstract and use meaning to organize information, often to the exclusion of form. The use of meaning as organization for linguistic stimuli, however, may be a result of the regularities available in the stimuli rather than a reflection of human cognition per se. We will argue on behalf of this claim, by demonstrating the abstraction and use of surface organization in linguistic material.One reason that the abstraction of form from linguistic material has been minimized historically is that the surface form appears too transient to be useful. In early studies, Sachs (1967) and Wanner (1974) dramatically demonstrated the rapid loss of the surface forms of text, with many later studies supporting and extending the finding to a wide range of conditions (for recent reviews, see Alba & Hasher, 1983;Brewer & Nakamura, 1984;Gernsbacher, 1985;Wallace & Rubin, 1989). For instance, Gernsbacher (1985) cites over 40 references supporting the rapid fading of surface form. Although many studies have shown that surface form is retained in memory (e.g., Brown & McNeill, 1966;Hunt & Elliott, 1980;Hunt & Mitchell, 1982; Koriat & Lieblich, 1974;Nelson, 1981;Rubin, , 1977, these studies do not provide clear evidence that form is used as the basis for the abstraction of structure. For example, evidence that the sound pattern is retained in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon could be taken as evidence for abstraction based on surface form, but it could also be explained by assuming partial recall of the sound of a word.The general experimental strategy used to show that meaning is the basis upon which people organize their linWe wish to thank Kirsten Neilsen and Cheryl Pou for help in testing the subjects, Wanda T. Wallace for her discussions throughout the project and Lynn Hasher and our reviewers for comments on the manuscript. Support for this research was provided by NSF Grant BNS-8410124. Reprints are available from David C. Rubin, Psychology Department. Duke University, Durham. NC 27706. guistic experience has been to select materials for which meaning was the only clear form of organization present, such as stories written in prose. The results of such experiments were attribu...

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