Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

There has been a great deal of interest in howgeneralizations and exceptions are learned, withparticular interest in how speakers learn to avoidovergeneralizations. Do overgeneralizations disappearonly because exceptions become more stronglyrepresented or does the generalization itself becomesuppressed? Novel labels were constructed bycombining 56 syllables with one of two prefixes, andeach label was assigned a unique image. Most labels withthe first prefix were paired with images from ageneralization category, whereas exceptional labels werepaired with images from a different semantic category.All labels with the second prefix appeared with a thirdcategory (“baseline”). Participants used a computermouse to choose one of two images for each label.Mouse-tracking results show that the generalizationitself became suppressed over time in the context ofexceptional labels. A post-test demonstrated thatexceptions were learned with item-specific precision.