Abstract

Can Relationality be Distinguished from Abstractness in Noun Mutability? Dedre Gentner ([email protected]) Department of Psychology, Northwestern University Evanston, IL 60208 USA Jennifer A. Asmuth ([email protected]) Department of Psychology, Northwestern University Evanston, IL 60208 USA psychological properties of these two kinds of concepts. Nouns can often be categorized as entity or relational according to whether they take arguments (To be an enemy, you have to be an enemy of someone or something, but you can be a person without further ado.) For relational nouns like carnivore that don’t need arguments, Asmuth and Gentner (2005) proposed the fetch test as a way of distinguishing entity and relational categories: if you are asked to find a member of the category, how do you know one when you see it? For an entity category like wolf, you need only consider the entity itself—its intrinsic properties suffice to identify it. But for a relational category like carnivore, intrinsic properties are not enough: you need to verify its relations to other entities (namely, that it eats animals). You can tell which items in the room are apples just by looking at them, but you can’t tell which things are gifts or weapons without knowing about their relations to other entities. Apart from the intrinsic interest of relational and entity concepts, relational nouns are important in that they figure strongly in adult discourse. Our informal ratings of the 100 highest frequency nouns in the British National Corpus revealed that close to half were relational nouns. For example, consider the following sentences: Abstract Previous studies have suggested that relational concepts are more mutable—more prone to change meaning in context— than entity concepts even when both relational and entity concepts are denoted by nouns (Asmuth & Gentner, 2005; Feist & Ferez, 2007). However, relationality is a complex dimension, and is highly correlated with other factors such as imageability and abstractness. In the current research, we compared the mutability of entity nouns and relational nouns while controlling for imageability (as well as frequency). People read these nouns in a given context and then had to recognize them in either the same or different context. We found that (1) participants showed greater recognition sensitivity for entity nouns than for relational nouns; and (2) recognition of relational nouns was more impaired by a change in context than was recognition of entity nouns. We conclude that the encoding of relational nouns is more influenced by context than the encoding of entity nouns and discuss parallels with encoding patterns for verbs and nouns. Keywords: sensitivity relational language; mutability; context Introduction Most psychological research on concepts has focused on entity concepts, such as cat or tomato, which are defined by common properties and belong to taxonomic hierarchies. However, recently there has been increased interest in relational concepts (Jones & Love, 2007; Feist & Ferez, 2007; Gentner, 2005; Gentner & Kurtz, 2005; Anggoro, Gentner & Klibanoff, 2005; Barr & Caplan, 1987; Markman & Stillwell, 2001). Relational categories are those whose membership is determined by common relational structure (such as extrinsic relations to other entities), rather than by common properties (see Gentner & Kurtz, 2005). For example, for X to be a carnivore, X must eat animals; for X to be a bridge, X must connect two other points or entities. The members of relational categories may share few or no intrinsic properties: e.g., sharks, eagles, tigers, and spiders are all carnivores. Relational categories thus contrast with entity categories like bird, whose members share large numbers of intrinsic properties. Interestingly, both entity concepts and relational concepts can be denoted by nouns (e.g., person versus enemy). This makes them an apt arena in which to compare the (1) This goal has priority until the performance deadline has passed. (2) The dog chased the ball across the field. Sentences like (1)—which contains mostly relational nouns—are more likely to occur in adult conversation than are sentences like (2). To understand the importance of relational nouns in our everyday discourse, try to express the meaning of (1) without using relational nouns. Relational nouns are similar to verbs and prepositions, in that their meanings are centered around extrinsic relations with other concepts 1 . Like verbs, relational nouns take an The extent of this extrinsic structure varies across different types of relational nouns. A distinction can be made between two kinds of relational nouns: schema nouns, such as robbery, denote relational systems and are defined by internal relational structure; role nouns, such as thief, are defined by extrinsic relations to the other entities in a relational schema (see Markman & Stillwell