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.