Basic Level Concern

While browsing the Ukrainian Wikipedia, I made it to the article on Птахи (Birds, you might call them) and I noticed something quite unusual. The picture they used for Birds was of some flamingos. I flipped through some other languages just to see what pictures people had, and many were relatively petite birds that you might consider to be prototypical as an English speaker (Robin is always given as the prototype in English, for Americans, it's effectively the bird-iest of the birds; incidentally, English Wikipedia has a wren) and quite a few had gulls, or birds that I would say were parrot-like. And there were a few other types that I thought might have some kind of basis, like the Cherokee stub for Birds having a picture of a turkey vulture.

As it looks, and I'll admit I haven't checked all of them, only Ukrainian and Russian Wikipedia features a flamingo as the primary picture of a bird (The Occitan article has an Owl though). I remember some time ago I was discussing basic level naming and prototype theory with a colleague and it was pointed out that you are more likely to produce typical members of the group. This makes a lot of sense in general, if one asked me to name a piece of furniture, I am more likely to say "chair" than "ottoman." Maybe this is just the case with animals, but, I tend to know a lot more "atypical" animals than "typical "ones. With the previous example of birds, the first birds that come to mind, and they won't be in any useful order for data since I've been looking at pictures of birds, would be:

sparrow, flamingo, vulture, parrot, hawk, crow, penguin, ostrich, robin, owl

Now, that's not a great sampling, but I bet that I could probably quickly come up with a good number of atypical birds:

flamingo, vulture, parrot, hawk, penguin, ostrich, owl, albatross, turkey, pelican, quail, emu, chicken, eagle, duck, goose, swan, falcon, kiwi, crane, stork, dodo, auk, booby, archaeopteryx

Probably more than typical, and certainly faster, and most of the typical would have at least one very distinct feature:

sparrow, crow, robin, wren, bluejay, cardinal, woodpecker, canary, dove, oriole, ?hummingbird, ?seagull, ?pigeon

It's probably the same for most animals, that the more distinctive they are, the easier they are to produce [I suppose this excludes animals you have reason to be around, which would probably trump this group, but after that, go straight for the most distinct, I asked a friend from Brooklyn and of course the first bird he gave was pigeon]. That seems pretty logical; most of the birds I came up with in the second catergory I consider pretty specific, whereas most of the former group of birds are quite "basic" to me, even if unusual. Regardless of how likely I am to come up with Wren before I get Flamingo in asking people to name a bird, I don't think somebody just picked the first bird they could think of, and I still don't think it's a great exemplar of Bird, but certainly it's a great example of how we index these kinds of things.