An attempt to use prototype theory to compile a more effective teaching alphabet.
This is a study on the differences between children’s language and the language used by
adults in writing for children. I expected the former to contain some neologisms, such as the names of
Teletubbies, which would be unlikely to be used by adult alphabet book compilers. My aim is to
construct an alphabet which is easier to learn, since it would correspond to the words which young
children habitually use.
Alphabet books are made up of the letters of the alphabet and have an example of a word
or words for each letter. They are widely used to teach alphabetical order and to extend children’s
vocabularies. Many books focus on a particular semantic field, such as farm animals, occupations or
characters from children’s literature. I confined my study to books which covered a wide range of
concepts, otherwise specific semantic fields would be given undue prominence. I use the term “alphabet
books” loosely, to include games, friezes and puzzles. The 42 alphabet books I collected had no more
than two entries per word; in books with several entries per letter, less common words were used. These
were compared to the lists made by 22 children between the ages of 3 and 9 when asked to think of an
alphabet and 8 replies to a questionnaire left in the children’s section of a local library. This asked the
parents of children aged between 4 and 8 to supply their child’s alphabet. In both cases, the first
responses of the children to each letter were recorded.
Alphabet books can be considered as a category of words beginning with each letter. The
principles governing the selection of these words can be described in terms of the ‘prototype theory’
formulated by Eleanor Rosch in 1973, which applied to semantic fields. Alphabets are not an example of
a semantic field; therefore it is not, strictly speaking, correct to use the term ‘prototype’, when referring
to the most popular response to a given letter. However, prototype theory yields some interesting insights
into the nature of many categories to which it was not originally applied. For example, it suggests
reasons why some alphabets may be learnt more easily than others. To illustrate why this might be the
case, it is necessary to outline the differences between prototype theory and the componential model of
categories which it challenged. According to the latter view, there are four rules which govern whether a
word is to be included in a given category:
1. Categories are defined by a set of attributes, ‘a conjunction of necessary and sufficient
features’ which must be present in their members.
2. ‘Features are binary’. They are either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers to questions. In the case of alphabet
books, either a word begins with a given letter, or it does not.
3. ‘Categories have clear boundaries’ - there are no ‘ambiguous cases’, corresponding to a single
meaning of a word which can be assigned to more than one category.
4. Each word in a category is of equal status, thus ‘aardvark’ would be as likely to be stated as
‘apple’.1
These assumptions were questioned by Wittgenstein, who discussed the complex set of things we
flippantly call ‘games’, some of which have ‘practically nothing in common with others’, e.g. darts and
athletics. He asserts that instead of relating such disparate examples of games to each other by means of
common features, we acquire individual examples and assign them to the category.2
Eleanor Rosch extended Wittgenstein’s proposition to include the concept of ‘prototypes’. A
prototype can be defined as the most typical member of a semantic field, as given by a native speaker.
Rosch’s work was concerned with semantic fields which are not particularly well-defined such as ‘fruit’
and ‘sport’, but the method has also been used to investigate such concepts as ‘odd number’, which is
not a semantic field but a mathematical construct. I will use the term ‘category’ to refer to concepts
1 J. R. Taylor, Linguistic categorization: Prototypes in Language Theory (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), pp. 23-4.
2 Ibid., p. 39.
which are not semantic fields, but which show prototypicality.
According to Rosch, semantic fields are an extension of prototypical examples. In a similar way,
the word ‘apple’ forms the basis of the category of words beginning with the letter ‘A’; it was found in
77% of children’s words for ‘A’, and in 70% of the alphabet books I collected. In the same way that
Wittgenstein suggested that we gradually accrue examples of games on the basis of their similarity to a
prototype, other ‘A’ words may be learnt by making a comparison with ‘apple’.
Prototype theory also asserts that there should be a degree of overlap between different
categories. Alphabet books are probably not a very good example of this, as a word either starts with a
given letter, or it does not. Research has been carried out on what must have seemed even more
unpromising fields from which prototypes could spring: odd and even numbers, females and twodimensional shapes.3 The prototypes for the categories tested by Rosch also occur in the alphabets
found, with the exception of ‘square’, the prototypical ‘two-dimensional shape’ (table 1):
Table 1: Some prototypes are frequently found in alphabet books.
Children’s alphabets
Alphabet books
Prototypes
Letter (%)
Semantic field (%)
%
Letter (%)
Semantic field (%)
%
mother
34 as mum(my)
female
20
2
female
2
apple
76
fruit
60
70
fruit
49
carrot
0
vegetable
0
7
vegetable
27
car
12
vehicle
20
9
vehicle
8
football
4
sport
50
0
sport
0
Thus, at least some prototypical examples of categories are popular choices for inclusion in
alphabet books, and are also present in children’s responses. The absence of vegetables or shapes is due
to a prototypical effect at the level of semantic fields, where ‘animal’ is the prototypical semantic field in
alphabet books, and in the responses of children. Animals are concrete nouns, with distinctive shapes,
such as that of the elephant or snake, and as such are easily illustrated, recognised and recalled. (See
figure 1).
Another possible explanation of the result is that it was due to the experiment itself. Subjects
may have been influenced by the experimenter's desire to grade their responses. This possibility was
investigated by measuring the response times for good and poor examples of each category (table 2).
[Figure 1]
The categories are mutually exclusive, except where an occupation was marked by gender.
Thus 'fireman' and 'cowboy', are classified in figure 1 as both 'male' and 'occupation', but 'nurse' is
3 S. L. Armstrong, L. R. Gleitman, H. R. Gleitman, ‘What some concepts might not be’,
Cognition 13 (1983), p.275.
not classified as 'female'. Likewise, superordinates, such as 'food' and 'insect' are not classified in the
subordinate category to which they refer.
In the alphabet books, other parts of speech as well as nouns were also used, but together,
superordinates, abstract nouns and adjectives accounted for only 3.3%' of alphabet books and 11.9% of
children's responses. Collating polysemic words was problematic, involving an arbitrary decision as to
whether 'top', for example, was used as a concrete noun, as in 'spinning top' or whether it represents
the abstract concept 'on top'. However, it is clear that monosyllabic concrete nouns are the norm. 'Cat'
is the prototype for 'C', but its corresponding superordinate or subordinate words, such as 'pet' or
'tabby' respectively, do not occur. The greater readiness of children to use abstract words indicates the
alphabet book's dependence on words which are easily illustrated. An example of children giving a
prototype which is not in any of the alphabet books I looked at, because it is not easily represented as a
picture, is 'N for naughty', a word which children must hear frequently.
Figure 2:
Sharon Armstrong et at. extended Rosch's work on prototype theory to investigate categories
in which we would expect membership to be a clear-cut issue. In the case of odd and even numbers.
people were asked to say whether various numbers were more or less 'odd' or 'even'. Surprisingly, the
results did not correspond with the common-sense view that numbers are either odd or even and that
any one number is as odd or as even as any other. Of the numbers tested, '3' was seen as the 'best' odd
number, while '447' was perceived as the 'worst'4; this effect was even observed in those who
disagreed with the view that numbers could be more or less 'odd'. Similarly 'mother' was found to be a
good example of the category 'female', while 'comedienne' was not. No members of the category
'female' or 'numbers' were rated lower than 'a moderately good example', therefore, 'females' and
'odd and even numbers' are not good examples of prototype categories.
The prototypicality of numbers can be explained by the fact that small numbers are more
frequently encountered than high numbers. The latter have 'reference points', such as 500, 1,000 and
5,000 - allowing us to imagine them from a convenient perspective. This was demonstrated by Rosch as
also occurring in colours, and in vertical and horizontal lines - shown by the fact that colours were
described using 'hedges' - such as 'is almost' and 'is sort of. She found that a reddish brown would be
called 'sort of red', whereas a line would be referred to as 'almost straight'.6 This would probably
not apply to alphabets, since we do not refer to a word such as 'apricot' as almost an apple, but
the
evidence for prototypes in what had been previously regarded as well-defined categories might suggest
that boundaries between letters are not as clear cut as we might imagine.
In a few cases, the responses of children did not conform to the rule that words must start with
the given letter - 'zylophone' (8 year old), 'u for computer' (6 year old ) - while Alexander and exit
were cited for 'x'. In alphabet books, 'box', 'fix', 'fox', 'wax' and 'x for kiss' were all given as
examples ofx words, while 'prize', 'bzzzz' (bee) and 'zzzzz' (asleep) were used for 'z'. In 19th century
alphabets, 'x' has been used to refer to 'XXX ale' or 10, the Roman numeral. Therefore, the semantic
range of at least some uncommonly encountered letters extends outside what we might consider their
natural boundary. This can be explained by prototype theory. As for numbers, prototype theory asserts
that letters too have reference points. Thus, the phoneme /ks/ gives rise to 'x for exit', and conventions
such as 'zzzzz for asleep', that are more frequently encountered than some words beginning with 'x'
and 'z', two of the least common letters in English. It is arguable that any definition of odd and even
numbers or of the alphabet should take this into consideration, even though such 'fuzziness' of
definition occurs only at the margins of the group.
This does not mean that criteria for inclusion in a category can be extended indefinitely. While
cats, for example, are in many ways similar to dogs, 'we do not want to say that cats are members, not
even highly marginal members of the category "dog"'7. To prevent this, many categories must also be
'in part definable in terms of essential attributes'.8
Yet this is not inconsistent with a classification in terms of prototypes. It merely seems that
the 'criterial attributes themselves display degrees of membership'9. Prototypes are apparent even in
categories we think of as being well-defined.
Table 2 - response times to examples of well-defined and prototype categories.'°
Prototype semantic fields
Good exemplars - time
(sees.)
Poor exemplars - time
(sees) fruit
0.903
1.125
sport
0.892
0.941
vegetable
1.127
1.211
vehicle
0.989
1.228
Well-defined categories
even number
1.073
1.132
odd number
1.088
1.090
female
1.032
1.156
two-dimensional shape
1.104
1.375
The inconsistency between the common-sense view that the category 'odd-number', for
example is well-defined and the perceived prototype responses led Armstrong et al. to propose instead
that 'the techniques used to elucidate the structure of [everyday categories] are flawed'.'
I think that a better approach is, as Taylor argues, to take the above experiment at face-value.
He proposes the existence of 'expert' and 'folk' categorisations of the same concept12.1 encountered
this distinction in attempting to place words from alphabets into their appropriate semantic fields, which
raised such questions as 'is a pumpkin a fruit or a vegetable?' and 'are "queen" and "king"occupations?'.
We typically refer to a dictionary to resolve such ambiguities. The Oxford English Dictionary
acknowledges different categorisations of the semantic field 'fruit', defining the word as:
The edible product of a plant or tree, consisting of the seed and its envelope, esp. the
latter when it is of a juicy pulpy nature. [. . .] As denoting an article of food, the word is
popularly extended to include certain vegetable products that resemble 'fruits' in their
qualities, e.g. the stalks of rhubarb.'13
This definition is descriptive of the way language is used to the extent that it does not prescribe the first,
'expert' definition of the category. However, the 'folk' category is implied to be subordinate, despite
the fact that most people would classify 'rhubarb' as a fruit. Similarly, the 'folk' category of the group
of letters beginning with 'x', as used by children and alphabet books alike, includes 'exit', whereas in a
dictionary this would not be admissible. Prescriptive lexicography can be seen as the elimination of any
such 'fuzziness' in definitions,14 or spellings, as was evident in English before the standardisation of the
language.
Prototype effects, Taylor argues, 'reflect the existence of an abstract schematic representation
of the category'.'5 While intuitively all numbers are equally odd, we have a notion of 3 as the most
typical example, by which others are compared. The prototype model assumes that categories cluster
around this 'mental representation of a prototype', and therefore, as a language is learnt, underextension occurs rather than over-extension. Words are added to a group by a perceived similarity to the
stereotype, but 'a child's emergent prototype category need not [. . .] be properly included in the adult
category'16 - hence the instance of 'u for computer'.
According to prototype theory, a period of restricted usage of a category is therefore followed
by more inventive responses, which need not be 'correct'. A three and a half year old recited the entire
Letterland alphabet. She had learnt the prototypes taught at nursery school, but had not yet acquired the
flexibility of vocabulary to formulate her own responses. An eight year old gave 'zylophone' for 'z';
this is an example of over-extension on the basis that 'xylophone' has the initial phoneme /z/.
I had expected to find other occurrences of neologisms in children's responses. An example of
an adult modifying his writing for children is in Mr. Lazy: 'Mr. Lazy is in Sleepyland/He is too lazy to
get out of bed'. 'Sleepyland', which might be defined as 'a place you go to when you are asleep or
dreaming', is not in the OED. In this example, which occurs in Mr. Lazy, Roger Hargreaves
overextended the suffixes that can be added to the word 'sleepy', such as 'sleepy-head' or 'sleepy-time'.
This hypothesis has not been confirmed by children's responses, very few of which are original. It
seems instead that children imitate alphabet books quite closely, especially for prototypical examples of
letters. This does not mean that neologisms are absent from children's language. During childhood, we
are predisposed to learn language. Tolkien discusses novel "play-languages', such as 'Nevbosh',
resulting from what he regards as a delight in 'using the linguistic faculty', which is 'strong in
children'.17
This is to be expected, since language development is not greatly dependent on children
receiving the attention of adults. It takes extremes of social deprivation for language development to be
prevented. A rare example of this is the case of a girl, 'Genie', who 'received practically no auditory
stimulation of any kind'”. having been locked in her bedroom for the first thirteen years of her life. In
addition to this, she was conditioned into silence by being beaten 'whenever she made any sound'19. On
being educated, she slowly regained language but her patterns of linguistic development indicated a
reliance on the right hemisphere of the brain. This suggests that during infancy, there is a 'critical
period' during which language is biologically programmed to occur in 'one hemisphere of the brain''0:
in a normal right-handed child, this is the left hemisphere. During this time. it is not surprising if novel
word-formations ensue.
This leaves the problem of how to account for the lack of originality I found in children. This
corresponds with Rosch's findings that prototypes are more easily acquired than less well known
examples of the same category. She analysed colour terms using a group of people from a Stone Age
culture, whose language had no terms for colour other than 'mili" which means 'dark' and mola.
meaning 'light'21. She found that they learnt terms for prototype colours, those that were in the centre of
a group of wavelengths that we would ascribe a colour range to - i.e. red rather than reddish-brown.
more easily than less familiar colours.
This finding might support Noam Chomsky's view that the remarkable fluency with which we
develop our first language can only be accounted for by an innate, biological mechanism for the
development of language, since the assumptions of one culture concerning colour were analogous to
those of a group who had been untouched by Western cultural assumptions. It might seem, therefore,
that linguistic prototypes are biologically 'given', since those for colour seem to transcend cultural
boundaries.
Feminists such as Deborah Cameron argue against any suggestion of innateness in language, as
it 'denies the importance of social influences on language'. This might imply that gender differences,
too, are biological in nature, and therefore cannot be changed by social processes. Patriarchy would
then have a biological basis. To counter this assertion, feminists argue that the different treatment of
boys and girls by their parents gives rise to differences in their language and attitudes. Likewise, our
native language and accent are not determined by our race but by the environment; we copy those
around us.
Neither of these positions has yet been proven. I think that a sensible position is somewhere
between these two extremes - clearly biological factors must play some part in language acquisition. It
seems absurd to propose that other physical characteristics can be inherited but our personality cannot.
On the other hand. the brain develops long after birth, and is therefore subject to many social factors
that must also be taken into account.
Prototypical analysis is also relevant to language acquisition. In the traditional model, 'a
category is acquired through the gradual assembling of the appropriate feature set"." This is due to the
fact that the adult criteria for membership of a category are not yet full\ understood, so that words can
be applied to inappropriate thing-.. One feature of my data from alphabet books might support this view
- the prototypes of every letter, s for sun (38%), n for nest (25%), u for umbrella (85%), were basic
concrete nouns, rather than superordinate terms, which made up only 1.?'"' of words in alphabet books,
and 1.1%' of children's responses. Prototype theory suggests that such basic words are overextended so
that they are applied where we would use collective nouns. An example of this is 'tree' which, in the
usage of alphabet books, seems to be generic; except for single instances of 'palm tree' and 'Xmas
tree', and two 'nut-trees' which are from a nursery rhyme, individual trees were not mentioned.
Both classical and prototype models of linguistic development explain the predominance of
concrete nouns in alphabets by the premise that they are the words which are first learnt. The classical
view is that additional rules of categories are learnt on the basis of similarities between such basic
words, while prototype theory argues that categories emerge on the basis of shared features with the
prototypical example.
As well as providing insights into the acquisition of language, alphabet books can also reflect
the way language has changed, if we compare those of different periods. For the same reason, there
should also be differences in the words which children choose and contemporary alphabet books.
It is interesting to note how the Ladybird abc has changed in editions from 1978 to 1997:
'Indian chief and 'ink' were used for "I' in 1978 and 1984 respectively, to be replaced in 1997 editions
b\ 'insect' and 'invitation'. The first of these changes may be due to the decline in popularity of
Westerns, or to the political correctness movement.
'Ink', which is invariably portrayed as a bottle of ink, has now been replaced by the biro, but it
is still the prototype response of children for the letter I. They must have copied the word rather than it
being suggested to them by their everyday life. Likewise 'telephone' and 'television' are used in 1993and
1997 editions replacing the 'tiger' and 'teeth' of the 1978 Ladybird books. This probably reflects
the increasing importance of telecommunications, although television and telephone are not as widely
used by the children as they were in recent alphabet books - there seems to be a lag therefore in the
disappearance of words from children's vocabularies, due perhaps to parents passing on words from
their childhood. This might also be due to the length of these words; words of three or more syllables,
with the exception of 'elephant', tended to be used only by older children. All the children tended to
favour monosyllabic words (see table 3).
Table 3 - numbers of syllables in children's words.
Length of words in children's alphabets (%)
Age
1 syllable
2 syllables
3 syllables
4 syllables
4
61
29
10
0
5
56
30
13
1
6
51
33
15
1
7
54
30
16
1
8
53
30
15
2
9
48
33
17
2
Figure 3: the length of words in alphabet books compared with that of children's responses
Thus, alphabet books use slightly longer words than most of their readership. This may be due
to adult compilers unconsciously using more sophisticated words, the most extreme example of which
was the five syllable '0 for observatory'. I expected that some semantic fields, most notably that for
'food' would also show differences between alphabet books and the children's alphabets (figures 4, 5).
Unsurprisingly, the children's alphabets included a higher proportion of sweets, while only one
vegetable, 'bean', was mentioned. Alphabet books included such words as 'radish' and 'quiche', which
children did not mention, but which reflect adult tastes in food.
Children do copy words from alphabet books. Every prototypical word in alphabet books also
occurred in children's responses, and 14 of the words were identical in both cases. Of the second most
frequent words in alphabet books, 'flower', 'jam', 'paint', 'quilt', 'rainbow' and 'zip' were not given
by any of the children. This supports Rosch's hypothesis that prototype words are more easily learnt;
the two sets of data show greater divergence for less common words.
The fact that prototypes are efficiently copied shows that those who advocate political
correctness might have a strong point. Alternatively, it could be argued that politically correct (PC)
vocabulary does not alter the prejudices which the words describe, but merely covers up our anxieties.
However, if the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is correct, and words govern the way we perceive the world ,
political correctness would be a force for the elimination of prejudices, and would be especially
important in children's literature.
Examples of PC alphabets include one asserting cultural relativism. It is drawn from the
experience of an African tribeswoman. with 'A' for 'Africa', 'K' for 'kola nuts', 'Y' for 'yams' and 'W
for 'weaving'. PC vocabulary is also common in the work-place. In a contemporary alphabet of
occupations, none of the words show gender marking:
A astronaut, B baker. C carpenter. D dentist, E engineer, F fire-fighter,
G gardener, H health worker. I illustrator. J judge, K kite-maker. L lamp-maker, M
mechanic, N nurse. 0 optician. P plumber. Q quarry worker,
R radio disc-jockey, S singer. T teacher. U umbrella maker, V vet.
W window cleaner X x-ray technician. Y yoga teacher, Z zoo keeper.2'^
The differences which political correctness has made to our vocabulary is made more apparent, if the
above alphabet is compared to a nineteenth century example:
A ale brewer, auctioneer, armourer, artist; B bookseller, butcher, baker;
C cooper, carpenter, cutler; D dyer, dairyman; E engraver, engineer; F fishmonger,
fiddler, florist; G grocer, glazier;
H hatter, hawker, haberdasher, horse dealer; I ironmonger
J jeweller; K knifemaker, knitter;
L letter-founder, lace-maker, locksmith, linen-draper;
M milliner, miner, merchant; N nurse, newsman;
0 oilman, optician, omnibus driver; P pastry cook. physician
Q quarry-man, quack doctor; R rope-maker, rider
S shoemaker, shipwright, scavenger, slater, surgeon, sawyer, saddler, smith; T tailor,
turner, tanner, tinker; U upholsterer; V vats. vintner
W wharfinger, wax-chandler; X 'XX' (20). XXX ale;
Y
yeoman,
youth;
Z
zoologist.26
The inclusion of 'ale brewer' and 'vintner", surprisingly adult examples of words, show a change in
what is regarded as acceptable in children's literature. The listing of 'scavenger' as an occupation also
shows a readiness to draw the attention of children to unpleasant aspects of life, as well as being an
indication of how far living standards have risen.
A comparison of the two sets of results shows that the suffix '-y' is used by children ('teddy'
We, 'mummy' 10%, 'daddy' 6%, 'Danny' 3% and 'bunny' 3%) but does not occur in alphabet books.
This is due to the prescriptive nature of alphabet books, which must show correct usage. An example of
this is 'mother' which was invariably used instead of the more childish forms in alphabet books,
whereas children preferred to use 'mum' (21%). However, 'teddy', which was used in 13% of alphabet
books, is the most common word for T'.
The results also show which letters are most difficult to learn. The percentages of children who
could not think of a word for the most difficult letters are as follows: 'X', 27%.; 'V 25%; 'K' 17%; 'I'
17% and '0' 16%;. This can be explained by these letters being used infrequently, or rarely being used
to start a word.
My results confirm the existence of prototypes for the letters of the alphabet - they are most
apparent in letters which have a restricted range of possible words such as 'Q' and 'U', but, with the
exceptions of 'P', 'T', 'V, 'W and 'L', all the letters exhibit clear prototypical examples. The same
words occur in both the responses of children and in alphabet books - this indicates that children find it
easier to think of words they encounter at school, and that prototypical examples of a semantic field are
easier to learn. Therefore, prototype theory suggests that the most effective teaching alphabet would be
one which uses the prototypes of each letter. Where there is no prototype for a given letter, e.g. in the
case of 'T" 'tree', 'top' and 'telephone' are ranked equally, preference has been given to monosyllabic
words in order to make the average length of the alphabet (1.58 syllables per word) correspond with
that found in the responses of 5 year olds.
An alphabet based on prototype theory:
Aa is for apple
Bb is for ball
Cc is for cat
Dd is for dog
Ee is for elephant
Ff is for fish
Gg is for gate
Hh is for hat or house
II is for ink
Jj is for jumping
Kk is for kite
LI is for lemon
Mm is for mum
Nn is for naughty
Oo is for octopus
Pp is for pig
Qq is for queen
Rr is for rabbit
Ss is for snake
Tt is for tree
Uu is for umbrella
Vv is for vase
Ww is for witch
Xx is for x-ray
Yy is for yo-yo
Zz is for zebra
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McLean
R.,
Pictorial
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