Use of recently-encountered examples during the interpretation of noun-noun phrases

During the interpretation of a noun-noun combination, a relation is selected to link the two noun constituents together. I examine some of the factors that influence this selection and test the feasibility of an instance-based approach to conceptual combination. The claim is that previously-encountered combinations influence the interpretation of a subsequent combined concept by altering the availability of the relation required to interpret the combination. According to this approach, people use knowledge about more familiar combinations such as chocolate bunny or chocolate candy when they are interpreting a combination such as chocolate vegetable. Three main questions are addressed. First, I investigate whether a recently-encountered combination influences the ease with which an unambiguous combination can be interpreted (Experiments 1-4). Second, I examine whether the influence of a recently-encountered combination is due to the increased availability of a relation, or due to the increased availability of lexical items (Experiments 5-7). Third, I test whether one of the constituents must be in common between the recently-encountered combination and the current combination or whether it is sufficient to repeat only the relation (Experiment 8). The results indicate that recently-viewed combinations influence conceptual combination and that this influence is due to lexical priming and relation priming. The data demonstrate that the modifier constituent must be in common between the prime and target to obtain relation priming.