Abstract

A key feature of human thought and language is compositionality, the ability to bind preexisting concepts and word meanings together in order to express new ideas. In the talk, I will discuss psycholinguistic evidence for how newly composed complex concepts are represented and held in mind. Our evidence suggests that the component parts of complex concepts are bound together using two different mechanisms, binding by synchrony and binding by asynchrony. Consistent with the predictions of certain compositional connectionist models, we show that complex concepts that can be bound together through synchrony are processed as fast as single concepts, while complex concepts that must be bound through asynchrony elicit a reaction time cost. Binding by both synchrony and asynchrony have been suggested as solutions to the “binding problems” faced in both vision science and higher-level cognition; our results suggest that these ideas can also explain aspects of compositional language processing.