| Conceptual combination enables the formation of higher-order concepts, provides the basis for natural language, and supports the remarkable creativity and flexibility of human thought. Although the cognitive foundations of conceptual combination are not currently well understood, increasing behavioral and neuroscience evidence suggests that individual concepts are represented in modality-specific systems, including representations of height, size, spatial alignment, and color. We report five experiments that evaluated whether these modality-specific representations underlie conceptual combination. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 assessed the role of height in conceptual combination by evaluating, for example, whether processing the noun phrase giraffe head is faster when head appears high (rather than low) on the screen, consistent with the upward shift of attention required to process the head of a giraffe in a perceptual simulation. The observed results failed to provide conclusive evidence that modality-specific representations underlie conceptual combination. Experiment 4 conducted a normative scaling study that validated the materials of the previous experiments and provided additional analyses that corroborated the earlier findings. Experiment 5 employed a long-term priming paradigm to assess the roles of size, spatial alignment, and color in conceptual combination. This study evaluated, for example, whether processing the noun phrase cake dish is faster when it is preceded by a picture of a cake that fits inside the dish (rather than a cake that is too large), suggesting that these concepts are combined in a perceptual simulation that represents their relative sizes. Experiment 5 failed to provide conclusive evidence that conceptual combination depends on modality-specific representations. Together, these findings suggest that further research is needed to substantiate the role of modality-specific representations in conceptual combination. |
