Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We examine how context affects the accessibility of features of combined concepts. A 'contrast hypothesis' suggests that contrasting a to-be-verified feature in the context hinders its later verification. Results of Experiment 1 instead support a priming hypothesis whereby features are differentially activated by contexts. Experiment 2 demonstrates that this priming effect is positive rather than negative, even when feature verification follows a contextual combined concept that is inconsistent with the to-be-verified feature. We conclude that context can differentially activate features of combined concepts, and that it may do so by way of semantic priming.