UNDERSTANDING NOUN PHRASES

One view of sentence comprehension is that word meanings are retrieved independently and then combined; another view is that the retrieved meanings for words are context dependent and thus different in different sentences. To examine retrieval of a noun's meaning in the context of an adjective, spoken sentences were probed with a picture. Subjects were instructed to respond positively if the picture illustrated a noun in the sentence (e.g., house), regardless of other information in the sentence (burning house) or in the picture. Even when the probe appeared immediately after an adjective-noun pair, an atypical picture incorporating the adjective was responded to more rapidly than a more typical picture. The results suggest that a noun's meaning is retrieved in conjunction with the adjective, not independently, when the phrase describes a familiar conception such as a burning house. © 1979 Academic Press, Inc.