@article{656,
  author = {Lauren Emberson and Nicole Loncar and Carolyn Mazzei and Isaac Treves and Adele Goldberg},
  title = {The blowfish effect: children and adults use atypical exemplars to infer more narrow categories during word learning},
  abstract = {<p>Learners preferentially interpret novel nouns at the basic level ({\textquotedblleft}dog{\textquotedblright}) rather than at a more narrow level ({\textquotedblleft}Labrador{\textquotedblright}). This {\textquotedblleft}basic-level bias{\textquotedblright} is mitigated by statistics: children and adults are more likely to interpret a novel noun at a more narrow label if they witness {\textquotedblleft}a suspicious coincidence{\textquotedblright} {\textemdash} the word applied to 3 exemplars of the same narrow category. Independent work has found that exemplar typicality influences learners{\textquoteright} inferences and category learning. We bring these lines of work together to investigate whether the content (typicality) of a single exemplar affects the level of interpretation of words and whether an atypicality effect interacts with input statistics. Results demonstrate that both 4-5 year olds and adults tend to assign a narrower interpretation to a word if it is exemplified by an atypical category member. This atypicality effect is roughly as strong as, and independent of, the suspicious coincidence effect, which is replicated.</p>},
  year = {2019},
  journal = {Journal of child language},
  volume = {46},
  number = {5},
  pages = {938{\textendash}954},
  publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
}