exemplar (n.)

A term deriving from cognitive psychology and used in PSYCHOLINGUISTICS as part of a theory of language ACQUISITION and storage. Exemplar theories assume that people represent categories by storing individual instances (exemplars) of the category in memory; the classification of a new exemplar proceeds by assessing its similarity to existing previous ones. In PHONETICS, the approach hypothesizes that LEXICAL representations consist of phonetically detailed memories; the data from which a learner abstracts a PHONOLOGICAL system is viewed as a population of variant forms, some of which are used more often than others and are thus more influential. In SYNTAX, the approach hypothesizes that grammatical constructions arise, not through the application of a set of RULES, but from a series of ANALOGICAL generalizations built up from the stored memories of previously encountered instances.