Publications [#351697] of Michael Tomasello

Journal Articles

1. Ibbotson, P; Theakston, AL; Lieven, EVM; Tomasello, M, Semantics of the transitive construction: prototype effects and developmental comparisons., Cognitive science, vol. 36 no. 7 (September, 2012), pp. 1268-1288 [doi]
   (last updated on 2025/06/15)

   Abstract:
   This paper investigates whether an abstract linguistic construction shows the kind of prototype effects characteristic of non-linguistic categories, in both adults and young children. Adapting the prototype-plus-distortion methodology of Franks and Bransford (1971), we found that whereas adults were lured toward false-positive recognition of sentences with prototypical transitive semantics, young children showed no such effect. We examined two main implications of the results. First, it adds a novel data point to a growing body of research in cognitive linguistics and construction grammar that shows abstract linguistic categories can behave in similar ways to non-linguistic categories, for example, by showing graded membership of a category. Thus, the findings lend psychological validity to the existing cross-linguistic evidence for prototypical transitive semantics. Second, we discuss a possible explanation for the fact that prototypical sentences were processed differently in adults and children, namely, that children's transitive semantic network is not as interconnected or cognitively coherent as adults'.