Typicality and Graded Membership in Dimensional Adjectives.

We present the results of an empirical study showing that the conceptual spaces framework can nevertheless be extended successfully to dimensional adjectives by complementing them with a comparison class argument (such as short/tall for an adult man and cheap/expensive for a smartphone), allowing participants to retrieve meaningful prototypical instances, which can be used to establish membership degree. Since dimensional adjectives are subjective, we investigate how the framework can accommodate interindividual variability in membership degree judgments. We find that the predictions of the framework significantly improve if prototypical instances themselves are assumed to come with a gradient instead of being considered equally typical, thereby providing a more fine-grained account of typicality and furthering the development of the conceptual spaces framework.
PMID: 30079568 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Source: Cognitive Science - August 5, 2018 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Verheyen S, Égré P Tags: Cogn Sci Source Type: research