This paper extends the accessibility hypotheses proposed by Janczura and Nelson (1999) to linguistic production and presents a procedure for evaluating the participation of attributes in typicality judgments. The results show that different degrees of typicality are not related to the probability of an attribute being considered a part of an exemplar but can be predicted by the strength of association between an instance and its category. It also demonstrates that accuracy in a linguistic production task can be explained in terms of the accessibility of category members in memory. These results parallel typicality judgments. That is, more accessible members in memory are considered better category exemplars. It suggests that memory for category information may underlie typicality judgments. The more a subject knows a category exemplar or its features, the better it is perceived as representing the category. This paper proposes that, for known categories, typicality should be re-interpreted as a measure of category accessibility rather than category representativeness.
Concept accessibility; tipicality; associative strenght; linguistic production; concepts
