Psychological Science 2007

Conceptual Combination During Sentence Comprehension

David Swinney¹; Tracy Love^2,1; Matthew Walenski¹; Edward E. Smith³

¹ University of California San Diego · ² San Diego State University · ³ Columbia University

Abstract

This experiment examined the time course of integration of modifier-noun (conceptual) combinations during auditory sentence comprehension using cross-modal lexical priming. The study revealed that during ongoing comprehension, there is initial activation of features of the noun prior to activation of (emergent) features of the entire conceptual combination. These results support compositionality in conceptual combination; that is, they indicate that features of the individual words constituting a conceptual combination are activated prior to combination of the words into a new concept.

DOI

10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01912.x

Sources

openalex

Cite

APA 7 MLA 9 Chicago (author–date) Harvard Elsevier Harvard (JFE, JBF…) The Accounting Review Academy of Management American Marketing Association INFORMS (Management Science) Copy citation Copied ✓