Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The literature on conceptual combination has thus far been limited to research at the aggregate level investigating adjective-noun and noun-noun combinations. One well-established phenomenon within this literature is that of concept dominance (Hampton, 1988), which is the finding that the relative contribution of constituent concepts (for example sport or game) to their conjunction (sport that is also a game) is often very unequal. This exploratory study investigated individual differences in how people understand adjective-adjective-noun combinations, such as long blue coat. Participants rated images of coats varying along the perceptual dimensions of length and color for typicality in two different conjunctions, namely long blue coat and long purple coat. We used multidimensional scaling (MDS) to construct an aggregate coat space from similarity data collected with the Spatial Arrangement Method (SpAM). Using external unfolding, we modeled participants' typicality judgements by representing their individual typicality data as vectors within the aggregate MDS space, such that orthogonal projections from the coats onto the vectors represent their perceived typicality in the conjunctions. We did not find strong evidence for concept dominance at the aggregate level; however, we did find evidence for concept dominance at the individual level, with marked individual differences in the extent of dominance and which dimension was dominant. The validation of external unfolding for research into conceptual combination comes with new research possibilities, several of which are proposed.