When combinatorial processing results in reconceptualization: toward a new approach of compositionality.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Readers often encounter incomplete propositional content, requiring them to infer unarticulated meaning constituents.
• Meaning adjustment occurs at both propositional (e.g., 'The baby drank the bottle') and phrasal levels (e.g., 'the wooden turtle').

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the cognitive processes underlying meaning adjustment in language comprehension.
• To examine how combinatorial processing and metonymic shifts are handled by the brain using event-related potentials (ERPs).

Main Methods:

• Two ERP experiments were conducted to analyze brain responses during specific linguistic constructions.
• Experiment 1 focused on container/content alternations (e.g., 'drank the bottle').
• Experiment 2 examined adjective-noun combinations that alter an entity's category (e.g., 'wooden turtle').

Main Results:

• Container-for-content alternations elicited a Late Positivity ERP component, indicating processing demands.
• Adjective-noun combinations causing a category shift also resulted in a Late Positivity.
• Content-for-container alternations did not show significant processing costs.

Conclusions:

• The Late Positivity component likely reflects the cognitive effort involved in discourse updating and reconceptualization.
• Meaning alternations are not uniform; some are effortless selections, while others necessitate significant cognitive reevaluation.
• Findings support a revised typology of metonymic shifts based on the nature of discourse referent processing.