Prototype Theory essays

Prototype Theory essays The "prototype theory" was proposed by Rosch (1978), who suggested that when people categorize objects they match them against "the prototype", i.e. an "ideal exemplar", which contains the most representative features inside the category. Objects that do not share all the characteristics of the prototype are still members of the category but not prototypical ones. She argued that prototypes represent a "basic level of categorization", e.g. "chair", as opposed to a "superordinate", e.g. "furniture" and a "subordinate" level, e.g. "kitchen chair". The prototype theory has been particularly fruitful in providing several researchers with a convenient explanation of some phenomena in studies of vocabulary acquisition and teaching, mental lexicon, as well as in studies of cognitive linguistics and linguistic data. Rosch's concept of prototype served Griffiths (1986) to illustrate "the nature of the mental representations children have for their nominals" (p. 295). He focuses on dissimilarities between the language systems of a child and an adult, paying special attention to the so-called "overextension", i.e. covering many meanings with one word only. It is exemplified by presenting the situations in which a little girl, R., applied the word "shoe" to denote "brown beetle", "doll's arm", "sock", "feet", "shoe". The author's explanation of this phenomenon is as follows: My version of prototypes theory ... would attribute to R's mind something like videotape recordings of one or more shoe-involving episodes from her life ... she compared what she was currently experiencing with episodes in her mental "video" library and found that current input was closer to something in the shoe collection than to anything else. (p. 298) The similarity was probably a matter of visual resemblance (colour of the beetle, shape of the sock and feet) and action (arm being fitted to a body). Just like Griffiths, Cook (1991) is also concerned with vocab...