A common assumption about our internal lexicon is that the meaning of words is underspecified and this underspecified representation is filled in based on the context in which the word occurs. In this paper I would like to explore a different hypothesis, that words are stored with overspecified representations which are ‘trimmed down’ by the context. This view seems to be in line with a well-known mechanism from psycholinguistics: suppression. Many studies have shown that conceptual properties of a word are initially activated but subsequently suppressed when these properties are in conflict with the context the word occurs in. This mechanism has not been tested, however, in a context where compositional application takes place as between an adjective and a noun. In this study I will discuss two lexical decision experiments testing the interpretation of two types of adjective noun combinations. For both types of combinations it is expected that the representation of the noun undergoes a change due to the conflicting information provided by the adjective. It is hypothesized that the properties of the noun that are in conflict with the adjective are initially activated, but subsequently suppressed to form a coherent representation of the adjective noun combination. While the results provide evidence for the initial activation of the conceptual properties, no evidence for the subsequent suppression was found. The initial activation shows that also in the case of adjective noun combinations, conceptual features do not ‘wait for’ an initial well-formed semantic structure. The lack of evidence for suppression primarily suggests the need for further research. If future experiments confirm that suppression does not take place within the time frame tested in the experiments, we must conclude, based on experimental findings by Schumacher (2013), that conceptual specification takes place after the shift in reference of the noun.

中文翻译：

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抑制形容词名词组合的解释和词典的性质

关于我们内部词典的一个常见假设是，单词的含义未明确指定，并且未指定的表示形式是根据单词出现的上下文来填充的。在本文中，我想探讨一个不同的假设，即单词存储有过多指定的表示，这些表示被上下文“修剪”了下来。这种观点似乎与心理语言学的一种众所周知的机制相符：压制。许多研究表明，单词的概念属性最初是被激活的，但是当这些属性与单词所处的上下文冲突时，这些属性就会被抑制。但是，这种机制尚未经过测试，但是，在词与词之间存在构词应用的情况下形容词和名词。在这项研究中，我将讨论两个词汇决策实验，测试两种类型的形容词名词组合的解释。对于这两种类型的组合，由于形容词提供的信息相互冲突，预计名词的表示会发生变化。假设与形容词冲突的名词的属性最初被激活，但随后被抑制以形成形容词名词组合的连贯表示。虽然结果提供了概念特性的初始激活的证据，但没有发现随后抑制的证据。初始激活表明，同样在形容词名词组合的情况下，概念特征也不会“等待”初始格式良好的语义结构。缺乏抑制的证据主要表明需要进一步研究。如果将来的实验确认抑制不在实验中测试的时间范围内发生，那么我们必须根据Schumacher（2013）的实验结果得出结论，概念上的规范发生在名词参考移交之后。