BASIC-LEVEL CONCEPT

The Modern concept of basic-level categories and its

accompanying empirical support was first complied and
articulated by Eleanor Rosch. As it continued to
develop, it became known as “the theory of Prototypes
and basic-level categories”, or simply “Prototype
theory”. Prototype theory is widely regarded as a
breakthrough in experimental psychology,
revolutionizing ideas of categorization and replacing an
earlier classical theory which defined categories far
more rigidly, in ways that did not match empirical
evidence. Resco’s theories were inspired by earlier
work by psychologists and anthropologists Robert
Brown
 BASIC-LEVEL CONCEPT
• Going hand to hand with the idea of basic-level
categories is the idea of Prototypicality.
• The other notion related to prototypes is that of a
Basic Level in cognitive categorization thus,
when asked what are you sitting on?, most
subjects prefer to say chair rather than a
subordinate such Kitchen chair or a super
ordinate such as furniture. Basic categories are
relatively homogeneous in terms of sensory.
 BASIC-LEVEL CONCEPT
• Rosch (1978) defines the basic level that
level that has the highest degree of cue
validity. Thus, a category like (animal) may
have a pontifical member, but no cognitive
visual representation. On the other hand,
basic categories in (animal), i.e. (dog),
(bird), (fish), are full of informational
content and can easily be categorized in
terms of semantic features.
 BASIC-LEVEL CONCEPT
• Another consequence which Rosch draws from
her basic assumption is that there should be
what she calls BASIC-LEVEL CONCEPTS, in
contrast with other concepts which are either
more general or more specific. Assuming that
there is at least some hierarchical structure in
our concepts, with more general ones like
‘furniture’ less general ones like ‘chair’, it should
be possible to work our which level in the
hierarchy gives the most information.
 BASIC-LEVEL CONCEPT
• For instance, accordingly, chair is the
basic level concept, in the sense that it is
the category that comes to mind most
naturally when we have to refer to an
object which could equally truly be
described as a piece of furniture, a chair
or a kitchen chair. There is obvious
support for this conclusions in the fact that
chair is just one word, in contrast with both
kitchen, chair and piece of furniture
 BASIC-LEVEL CONCEPT
• The relevance of basic-level concepts to the
question of relativity is two-fold.
• First, if it is true that concepts tend to be
reorganized hierarchically around basic ones,
we should expect to see similarities between
languages in the hierarchical organization of
their vocabulary.
• Berlin found that in a wide verity of languages
the names for plants and animals are organized
into five or six levels of which the third from the
top is the basic, one.
 BASIC-LEVEL CONCEPT
• For instance, English has a hierarchy
represented by terms like plant, tree, pine,
ponderosa pine and northern ponderosa pine,
and in this hierarchy the third level, represented
by pine, is the lowest at which a single word is
used, suggesting that it is basic.
• Berlin and his colleagues found that all the
languages they had about the same number of
level-three terms in the ‘biology’ hierarchy.
Taken together, these findings represent a high
degree of similarity between languages and their
semantic structure.
 BASIC-LEVEL CONCEPT
• The second connection between basic-level
concepts and relativity is that they offer an
additional area with respect to which people may
differ in their language, thus making the relativity
of language look rather greater. People differ in
the particular concepts which they treat as basic.
• For instance, research done by Rosch showed
that people who live in towns treat ‘tree’ rather
than , say, ‘pine’ as basic, because they are less
familiar with specific properties of pine trees than
the country-dwellers with whom Berlin and his
colleagues mainly worked.