The role of familiarity in determining typicality.

M.H. Ashcraft found that people tend to know more properties of items they rate as typical of a category than of items they rate as atypical, suggesting that variations in typicality result from variations in familiarity. Three experiments were designed to challenge this suggestion. The'first investigated whether familiarity is necessarily correlated with typicality ratings for a large sample of category members that span the typicality range. In this expAriment, 20 college students generated properties foi category members and 19 other students rated the category members for typicality. Approximately 300 students participated in the second experiment, which tested whether, for a random sample of 15 items from each of 8 categories, a positive correlation would be found between typicality ratings and number of properties listed. The third experiment produced a set of typicality ratings in which the 20 subjects were able to indicate that they were unable to rate the item because they were unfamiliar with it. Results showed that (1) subjects sometimes produced more properties for items they rated low in typicality; (2) in a large, random sample of items, subjects tended to produce fewer properties for atypical items; and (3) subjects tended to assign totally unfamiliar words to the bottom of a typicality scale rather than reflect low typicality of the referents themselves. (FL) *********************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document. * *********************************************************************** U.& DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (EMI CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF READING ?this document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating R. fl Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official NIE position or policy Technical Report No. 250 THE ROLE OF FAMILIARITY IN DETERMINING TYPICALITY Barbara C. Malt Stanford University Edward E. Smith Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. . University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 51 Gerty Drive Champaign, Illinois 61820 June 1982 Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. 50 Moulton Street Cambridge, Massachusetts 02238 00 The research reported herein was supported in part by the National Institute of Education under Contract No. HEW-NIE-C-400-7670116, and in part by U.S. Public Health Service Grant MH-19705. This paper will appear in the journal Memory and Cognition in 198i.