The relationship between category typicality and concept familiarity: Evidence from Spanish- and English-speaking monolinguals

We examined the relationship between an item’s familiarity and its category typicality, employing ratings obtained from Spanish- and English-speaking monolinguals living in southern Florida. In the first experiment, Spanish- and English-speaking monolinguals were asked to rate the prototypicality of instances of 12 common language categories. The correlations between the Spanish and English speakers’ rated item typicality indicated that the prototypicality gradients of the Spanish and English monolinguals were fairly discrepant for a number of categories. In the second experiment, we examined the degree to which these differences in cultural typicality could be accounted for by differences in rated cultural familiarity. It was predicted that, if familiarity plays a role in determining cultural differences in prototypicality, statistically controlling for the effects of cultural familiarity should result in higher interlingual typicality correlations. This should be true particularly for those categories for which there is a wide discrepancy in the typicality gradients for the two language groups. These predictions were confirmed. Consequently, we conclude that item familiarity is at least one variable influencing cultural differences in category typicality gradients.