Figure 2.

The semantic complexity hierarchy illustrating semantic and phonological representations within a sample category (bird): (a) atypical examples consist of core and distinctive features (and therefore exert more weight, represented by bold dashed lines) than typical examples which consist of core and shared prototypical features (resulting in less weight, represented by unbold dashed lines). The application of the typicality treatment (b) during treatment of atypical examples, strengthening the features for those examples also reinforces features relevant to more central typical examples, thereby facilitating phonological access for typical examples also (represented by bold solid lines), (c) training atypical features does not exert any weights on the untrained atypical examples. Consequently, access to atypical examples is not facilitated.