Representation and access of relational information during conceptual combination

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Concepts are mental entities that allow a person's experience with the world to be organized into meaningful units.  The ability to store and access conceptual information is vital to human cognition because many tasks that people perform on a daily basis (such as classification, prediction, reasoning, and communication) require the application of existing knowledge to new situations.  The long-term goal of my research program is to determine how relational information is stored in the conceptual system and to understand how such information influences the way people understand and use concepts. To do so, I have focused on conceptual combination, which is a process whereby new concepts are created by combining established concepts. For example, the concepts "grass" (the modifier) and "cord" (the head noun) can be combined to create the new concept "grass cord". The constituent concepts are linked by the MADE OF relation.An important step toward this goal is to understand how combined concepts are stored in memory and to understand how the relations used to link the constituent concepts are structured. Therefore, the current research project has two aims. The aim of the first series of experiments is to systematically examine the ability of the modifier and head noun to serve as a retrieval cue for a modifier-noun phrase and, thereby, gain a better understanding of the way in which the mental representation for a combined concept is connected to other representations in the conceptual system. In addition, I will examine the ability of the linking relation to influence the retrieval of previously-encountered phrases. The aim of the second series of experiments is to determine whether relations exhibit a hierarchical structure in which general relations (e.g., HAS) are subcategorized into more detailed relations (e.g., HAS-PART and HAS-OWNERSHIP) and, if so, whether people make use of the subcategories during conceptual combination.