Categorizations which humans make of the concrete world are not arbitrary but highly
determined. In taxonomies of concrete objects, there is one level of abstraction at which the …

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the internal structure of perceptual and
semantic categories. The semantic categories of natural languages are made to appear …

Two implications of best-example theory for category acquisition were considered. The first
is that categories which people acquire based on initial exposure to good exemplars should …

90 MERVIS & ROSCH by two major trends: 1. The study of naturalistic categories (for
example," red,"" chair") particularly as influenced by input from anthropology, philosophy …

The hypothesis of the study was that the domains of color and form are structured into
nonarbitrary, semantic categories which develop around perceptually salient “natural …

We are forever trying to carve nature at its joints, dividing it into categories so that we can
make sense of the world. If we see a particular child pet a particular dog at a particular time …

Support for the prototype theory of categorization was found in a study of the structure of
social categories. Though occupational terms such as DOCTOR are socially defined, they …

The composition of 9 natural language categories (animals, clothes, colors, flowers, fruit,
furniture, insects, tools, vegetables) in recall from long-term semantic memory at 2 ages (5 …

f For humans facing a host of experiences in a complex world, an imponant l. activity is to
break up these experiences into meaningful, more manageable l components. This is the …

The category utility hypothesis holds that categories are useful because they can be used to
predict the features of instances and that the categories that tend to survive and become …