Abstract

The process of conceptual combination involves accessing two or more concepts and, determining how they fit dogether to form a new concept. In a sense, conceptual combination is very broad in scope, involved in many situations in natural language understanding. For example, understanding a story probably includes the combining of concepts of the individual sentences. Understanding a sentence, in turn, probably ilicludes combining the meanings of-noun, verb, and prepositional phrases. To understand a noun; verb, or preposi-tional phrase, we combine the meanings of individual words. In this chapter, we 1, will focus on how people combine concepts when they attemft to understand complex noun phrases (i.e., noun phrases other than those consisting of a noun or a determiner and a houn). For example, tb understand a phrase like "elephant tie," one might combine the concepts elephant and tie in such a way to mean, "a tie worn by circus elephants" or "a tie with a picture of an elephant on it."r These are possible interpretations of the phrase "elephant tie." Recently, there has been a fair amount of psychological research on this kind of conceptual 'combination (e. Besides models of understanding complex noun phrases, there has also been research on how people combine the mebnings of nouns and verbs in understanding sentences (Gentner & Franc-e, 1988). This chapter is organized into three parts. In the first part, we introduce u2 the process of cohceptual and discuss its importance as a topic of investigation. we will outline some e'mpirical results of studies on conceptual combination and general challenges tiat any theory of conceptual combination , must address. In the second part, wg present three psychological models of ,i. conceptual combination and evaluate ihem in terms of the specific psychologi-"- .,-cal findings and theigeneral challengers outlined in the first part of thi chapier.'ti")'. The models are the attribute inheritan"ce model (Hampton, 1987), the selective modification model (Smith et al., 1988) and the concept specialization model (Cohen & Murphy, l9&4; Murphy, 1988). In the third part of the chapter, lie examiie one of the major assumptions of two of the conceptual combination'models. Both the-selective modification and concept specialization models prdpose a type of slot filling as the primary mechanism for combining concepts. (A process called elaboration is also very important in the concept specializatioh model.) In these models, concepts are composed of slots and fillers (as in frdmes and schemata). One combines a …