Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present study seeks to substantiate a cognitively-groundedmodel of synchronic meaning variation and diachronic mean-ing change. We propose that inter-comprehender vari-ability in CONTEXT-SENSITIVITY drives variation in word-meanings along conceptual structure pathways; we test thismodel through English have and its underlying LOCATION-POSSESSION conceptual structure. Through acceptability rat-ings, self-paced reading times, and ERPs, we show thatrelevant context can facilitate the dispreferred but plausibleLOC interpretation of a have-sentence–the degree of facil-itation is predicted by individual differences in CONTEXT-SENSITIVITY, indexed here by gender and Autism Quotient.Altogether, our results suggest that the variation of have-sentences’ meanings is principled due to its unified concep-tual structure, and that conceptual structure together with con-text cooperate in guiding comprehension by modulating thesalience of competing variants in real-time. Ultimately, di-achronic change is naturally emergent from this model of nor-mal language processing.