The conceptual basis of graded categories

Two implications of the Conceptual Base View of Categorization (Honeck, Kibler, & Sugar, 1985) were tested. First, to the extent that subjects form similar schemas or conceptual bases, their judgments of the exemplariness of various events should agree, and, second, whether a conceptual base is framed from verbal or pictorial inputs should not matter. To test these implications, subjects were provided different reference stimuli as guides for ranking a set of sentences in terms of how well they illustrated the deeper meaning of the reference stimuli. These stimuli were an excellent verbal instance of the figurative meaning of a proverb, a poor verbal instance of this meaning, an abstract picture representing this meaning, or nothing (control group). The results yielded four lines of evidence that were consistent with the Conceptual Base View.