Representation and access of relational information during conceptual combination

概念是一种精神实体，它允许人们将对世界的体验组织成有意义的单位。存储和访问概念信息的能力对人类认知至关重要，因为人们每天执行的许多任务（如分类、预测、推理和交流）需要将现有知识应用于新情况。我的研究项目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，我把重点放在概念组合上，这是一个通过结合已有概念创造新概念的过程。例如，“草”（修饰语）和“绳”（头名词）这两个概念可以结合起来创造出“草绳”这个新概念。构成概念是由MADE OF关系联系起来的。实现这一目标的一个重要步骤是理解组合概念如何存储在内存中，以及理解用于连接组成概念的关系是如何构建的。因此，目前的研究项目有两个目的。第一个系列实验的目的是系统地检验修饰语和头名词作为修饰语-名词短语检索线索的能力，从而更好地理解一个组合概念的心理表征是如何与概念系统中的其他表征相联系的。此外，我将研究链接关系对检索以前遇到的短语的影响。第二个系列实验的目的是确定关系是否表现出一种层次结构，在这种结构中，一般关系（例如，HAS）被细分为更详细的关系（例如，HAS- part和HAS- ownership），如果是这样，人们是否在概念组合过程中使用这些子类别。

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.