CONTEXTUAL INFLUENCES ON THE COMPREHENSION OF COMPLEX CONCEPTS

Four experiments demonstrated that the comprehension of novel compound nouns involves the recognition of a general relationship between two categories. Experiment 1 found that reading time is not impaired when a story only implicitly gives the relation underlying a compound noun. Experiment 2 demonstrated that comprehension of both explicit and implicit compounds allows swift and accurate verification of their meanings in a delayed recognition test. Experiment 3 showed that interpreting both explicit and implicit compounds facilitates later comprehension relying on that interpretation. Experiment 4 found that comprehension of a novel compound facilitates processing of a second compound that shares a similar categorical relation, even when there is no lexical overlap.