Romney, A. K., Brewer, D. D., & Batchelder, W. H. (1996). The relation between typicality and semantic structure. Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, 6, 1-14.
Rosch and Mervis (1975) indirectly showed a strong positive relationship between a lexical item's typicality and its similarity to all other items in a natural semantic domain. Thus the most typical items in a domain should be found in the center of a judged similarity scaling representation. We examine this model, and three additional models, of the relation between typicality and semantic similarity in two different word lists drawn from each of six natural semantic domains. The distribution of typicality is not well accounted for by any of the four structural models, which suggests caution in the application of the concept of typicality if any assumptions about relations to semantic similarity are involved.