Abstract

Conceptual combination is a fundamental human cognitive ability by which people can experience infinite thinking by artfully combining finite knowledge. For example, one can instantly combine “cactus” and “fish” together as “prickly fish” even if one has never previously heard of a “cactus fish.” Although two major combinatorial types—property and relational combinations—have been identified, the underlying processes of each remain elusive. This study investigates the asymmetric processing mechanisms underlying property and relational combinations by examining differential semantic activation during noun–noun conceptual combination. Across two experiments utilizing each combinatorial process as semantic priming and implementing a lexical decision task immediately after combination, we measure and compare the semantic activation patterns of intrinsic and extrinsic semantic features in these two combinatorial types. We found converging evidence that property and relational combinations involve asymmetric semantic information and entail distinct processing mechanisms. In property combination, the intrinsic feature in the modifier concept showed greater activation than the semantic feature of the same dimension in the head concept. In contrast, in relational combination, the extrinsic semantic feature in the head concept and the whole modifier concept showed similar levels of activation. Moreover, our findings also showed that these patterns of semantic activation occurred only when the combinatorial process was complete, indicating that accessing the same lexical-semantic information is not sufficient to observe asymmetric patterns. These findings demonstrate that property combination involves replacing a specific semantic feature of the head noun with that of the modifier noun, whereas relational combination involves completing the semantic feature of the head noun with the whole modifier concept. We discuss the implications of these findings, research limitations, and future research directions.

Highlights

  • How would you interpret the following noun–noun combinations: “feather luggage” or “piano blanket?” The purpose of this study was to investigate the processing mechanisms underlying property and relational combinations

  • The faster response time (RT) for modifier probes than for head probes indicate that an intrinsic feature of the modifier noun is activated more than a semantic feature of the head noun for the same dimension

  • In relational combination, there was no difference in RT between the head and modifier probes, indicating simultaneous activation of the extrinsic feature of the head noun and the whole modifier concept

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Summary

Introduction

How would you interpret the following noun–noun combinations: “feather luggage” or “piano blanket?” The purpose of this study was to investigate the processing mechanisms underlying property and relational combinations To this end, we examined the differential semantic activations that occur when faced with various noun–noun conceptual combinations. To semantically integrate multiple concepts, one should first access the semantic information of those concepts and determine how they fit together to form a novel one This is an essential and fundamental human cognitive ability by which people can create unlimited novel concepts from a limited set of existing ones. In this regard, conceptual combination is regarded as a cornerstone that can shed light on human creativity (Murphy, 2004; Prinz, 2004)

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