Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We asked whether categories expressed through lists of salient exemplars (e.g., car, truck, boat, etc.) convey the same meaning as categories expressed through conventional superordinate nouns (e.g., vehicles). We asked English speakers to list category members, with one group given superordinate labels like vehicles and the other group given only a list of salient exemplars. We found that the responses of the group given labels were more related, more typical, and less diverse than the responses of the group given exemplars. This result suggests that when people do not see a superordinate label, the categories that they infer are less well aligned across participants. In addition, categories inferred based on exemplars may be broader in general than categories given by superordinate labels.