Representation and access of relational information during conceptual combination

概念是精神实体，它允许一个人对世界的体验被组织成有意义的单元。存储和获取概念信息的能力对人类认知至关重要，因为人们日常执行的许多任务(如分类、预测、推理和交流)需要将现有知识应用于新的情况。我的研究计划的长期目标是确定关系信息如何存储在概念系统中，并了解这些信息如何影响人们理解和使用概念的方式。为此，我将重点放在概念组合上，这是一个通过组合已有概念来创造新概念的过程。例如，“草”(修饰语)和“绳”(中心名词)这两个概念可以组合在一起，形成新的概念“草绳”。构成概念通过关系的构成联系在一起。

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.