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. 2007 May;18(5):397-400.
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01912.x.

Conceptual combination during sentence comprehension: evidence for compositional processes

David Swinney  1 , Tracy Love, Matthew Walenski, Edward E Smith
Affiliations

Conceptual combination during sentence comprehension: evidence for compositional processes

David Swinney et al. Psychol Sci. 2007 May.

Abstract

This experiment examined the time course of integration of modifier-noun (conceptual) combinations during auditory sentence comprehension using cross-modal lexical priming. The study revealed that during ongoing comprehension, there is initial activation of features of the noun prior to activation of (emergent) features of the entire conceptual combination. These results support compositionality in conceptual combination; that is, they indicate that features of the individual words constituting a conceptual combination are activated prior to combination of the words into a new concept.

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