A PSYCHOLOGICAL METHOD TO INVESTIGATE VERBAL CONCEPTS

The method of sorting is used to study how lexical information might be organized and stored in memory. Judges sort a set of lexical items into clusters, and data from several judges are pooled. The number of judges putting a pair of items into the same cluster is taken as a measure of the proximity of those two items. Constraints on the resulting data that are attributable to the method itself and consequences following from different structural hypotheses are considered. Data for 48 common nouns are used to test the assumption that when items are clustered it reflects a decision to ignore particular conceptual features that would normally distinguish those items, and an argument is made that the conceptual features used by most judges derive from presuppositions and assertions contained in the definitions of the nouns. © 1969.