Influence of thematic relations on the comprehension of modifier-noun combinations.

Abstract

To comprehend a nonpredicating combination involving a modifier (e.g., mountain) and a head noun (e.g., stream), one must specify a thematic relation (e.g., a stream in the mountains) that links the 2 constituent concepts. The authors investigated the influence of thematic relations on the comprehension of nonpredicating combinations. Experiments 1 and 3 demonstrated that people use information about what relations the constituents typically instantiate during conceptual combination. More specifically, a combination is easier to interpret when it uses a frequent relation of the modifier than when it uses a less frequent relation. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that these results are not an artifact of the individual component words. The authors propose a model of conceptual combination called the competition among relations in nominals (CARIN) model in which ease of comprehension depends both on the frequency of the to-be-selected relation and on the frequency of the alternatives.

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Cited by (1)

1. Toward a brain-based componential semantic representation
   Binder, Jeffrey R., Conant, Lisa L., Humphries, Colin J., Fernandino, Leonardo, Simons, Stephen B., Aguilar, Mario, Desai, Rutvik H. · 2016 · Cognitive Neuropsychology

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