Table 1.
Example narrative with speech specificity varied. Half of the stories contained ambiguous words indicating a category; half contained unambiguous words indicating a particular exemplar of the category. Words manipulated across conditions are bolded.
| Stacie was excited when her parents brought home her new bird/pet. Sparky, who was cute as could be, tried to bite her when she fed him. The mess that he made all over forced Stacie to put down newspapers. When she tried to move him onto the newspapers, Sparky pecked/attacked her again! That night, as Stacie tried to put Sparky in a cage, he flapped/struggled non-stop and even scratched her with his claws. She must have left the cage open, because in the morning Sparky had escaped. |