Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When people think about the features of scissors, they often spontaneously recall a central feature of scissors: they cutthings. They tend not to recall other features of scissors, e.g., that they have handles. The present paper posits a novelexplanation for the behavior: the features people recall first and most often reflect semantic generalizations of kinds. Arecent taxonomy of such generalizations suggests that people represent privileged links between kinds and their featuresknown as principled connections (Prasada et al., 2013). Principled connections can reflect norms, and one way to diagnosethe presence of a principled connection is to test the acceptability of sentences of the form all normal Xs have featureY, as in all normal cars have four wheels. We tested whether participants accept generalizations about the normality offeatures produced in a semantic feature production task. Two experiments provided participants with generalizations aboutfeatures listed first and most often as well as features that people list less frequently. Both experiments found that peoplereadily accepted generalizations about the normality of frequently produced features. The results corroborate the view thatprincipled connections help people recall the features of conceptual categories.