Thematic typicality in modifier-noun conceptual combinations: Controlling for presentation-order effects

Conceptual combination involves combining two concepts into one phrase. This dissertation on noun-noun conceptual combination addressed whether the modifying noun or head noun is more important in terms of comprehension of a conceptual combination. Recent research in conceptual combinations has focused on this area because noun-noun combinations are ubiquitous examples of linguistic creativity and often highlight the creative aspects of human cognition. A schema-based approach holds that the head noun concept plays an important and ultimate role in comprehension of combinations. A relation-based approach holds that modifiers play a larger role in comprehension of modifier-noun combinations than the head noun. The latter approach, however, is confounded by the fact that, in English, the modifier almost always is antecedent to the noun to which it refers and, thus, the import of the modifier may be due to its antecedent position. The present dissertation used a novel methodology to control for the presentation-order effect in English. Experiment 1 examined whether the modifier's thematic frequency was related to the comprehension time of the whole phrase independent of its antecedent position to the head noun. Participants made Sense/Non-sense judgments to modifier-noun combinations. Results indicate that, indeed, participants take longer to comprehend a phrase when the thematic frequency of the modifier is low. Importantly, this relation between the modifier's frequency and the comprehension time is not due to its antecedent position because the head noun was presented to participants before the phrase was presented as a whole. Experiment 2 replicated the main results of Experiment 1 and confirmed that exposure to the head noun of a phrase, a key feature of the present methodology, was being processed by the participants. Thus, Experiment 2 supports the pattern of results from Experiment 1. Further, a series of analyses examining the nature of the stimuli and resultant re-analyses of the reaction times of participants in Experiments 1 and 2 ruled out potential confounds as explanations of the patterns of results. It seems that the lower the thematic frequency of the modifier, the longer the comprehension time of the combination, irrespective of the modifier's antecedent position.