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SUMMARY:Getting the gist: experience and expectation in the interpretation
  of novel compound nouns - Dr Melaine Bell (Anglia Ruskin University) 
DTSTART:20190214T163000Z
DTEND:20190214T180000Z
UID:TALK120115@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Julia Heine
DESCRIPTION:Since Gagné and Shoben (1997)\, evidence has accumulated that
  humans use statistical semantic preferences associated with compound cons
 tituents in the interpretation of compound nouns. Most of this work has fo
 cused on the semantic relation between constituents\, rather than interpre
 tation of the constituents themselves. Yet due to the ubiquity of polysemy
  and homonymy\, there are typically several readings to choose from for an
 y given constituent\, and it is not clear at the outset which one is to be
  used. This holds both for modifiers and heads\, and for readings that are
  unrelated (plant factory/organism) as well as those that are metaphorical
 ly linked (gold material/colour). Using attested novel compounds\, I show 
 that diversity of interpretation is much greater than suggested by studies
  that focus only on semantic relations and that the ambiguity of the const
 ituents\, especially the head\, plays an important role in determining bot
 h difficulty and diversity of interpretation. Current models of conceptual
  combination focus either on rather underspecified semantic relations or o
 n ‘slot-filling’ in the semantics of the head\; in either case\, it is
  unclear how and at what stage disambiguation of the constituents takes pl
 ace. The results presented here indicate that future incarnations of such 
 models will need to address this challenge if they are to account for the 
 interpretation not only of familiar but also of novel compounds. \n\nRefer
 ence\nGagné\, C. L. and E. J. Shoben (1997). Influence of thematic relati
 ons on the comprehension of modifier–noun combinations. Journal of Exper
 imental Psychology: Learning\, Memory\, and Cognition 23(1)\, 71–87. \n\
 n
LOCATION:Gr-06/7 (English Faculty Building)
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