As can be seen in Figure 
, the non-overlapping
categories
were learned considerably faster than the overlapping categories
(
).
Even in the context of disambiguating lexical dimension inputs,
overlapping categories are more difficult to learn than
non-overlapping ones.
Since lexical dimensions in the linguistic context favor adjectives, but
overlap (along with volume and compactness) favors nouns, these
results are consistent with the idea
that the developmental
trajectory observed in children may arise from a consortium of
differences between the associative structure of nouns and
adjectives that jointly but not necessarily singly favor
nouns.
: Experiment 5: Category Overlap.
Performance is the proportion of test items for which the highest
overt response was correct.
There were two separate runs of the network,
one for each condition.
