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# **Complement Coercion as the Processing of Aspectual Verbs: Evidence from Self-paced Reading and fMRI**

#### **Yao-Ying Lai, Cheryl Lacadie, Todd Constable, Ashwini Deo and Maria Mercedes Piñango**

**Abstract** The so-called coercion verbs have been taken to select for an event as their complement, and to coerce an entity-denoting complement into an event as a resolution to the predictable type mismatch. This process is reported to manifest as additional processing cost that unpredictably has been associated with more than one cortical recruitment locus. Recent work has challenged the traditional view showing that the processing effect is observed only for aspectual verbs (e.g., *begin*) but not psychological verbs (e.g., *enjoy*) (Katsika et al. 2012), and that contra the traditional assumption aspectual verbs not only select for events but also for entity-denoting complements (Piñango and Deo 2015). Here, we test the hypothesis that aspectual verbs require their complement to be conceptualized as a structured individual. These verbs encode a set of functions that allow the construal of the structured individual as an axis along a dimension (e.g. *spatial, eventive*) afforded by the complement. The processing cost associated with the composition of the "coercion configuration" (animate subject + aspectual verb + entity-denoting complement) emerges from (A) exhaustive retrieval of the verbs' lexical functions and (B) resolution of dimension ambiguity. Results from a self-paced reading and an fMRI experiment confirm that processing aspectual-verb sentences is more costly than psychological-verb counterparts, and that consistently with previous findings, comprehension is associated with both a Wernicke's area and a left inferior frontal cortex activation. Crucially, this activation pattern tracks the necessary exhaustive lexical retrieval of the functions at the verb (Wernicke's area) and the subsequent ambiguity resolution of the dimension at the complement (LIFG) required for the interpretation of the aspectual-verb utterance.

Y.-Y. Lai (✉) ⋅ M.M. Piñango Department of Linguistics, Yale University, New Haven, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
C. Lacadie ⋅ T. Constable Yale Magnetic Resonance Research Center, New Haven, USA

A. Deo Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State, Coloumbus, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2017 J.A. Hampton and Y. Winter (eds.), *Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology*, Language, Cognition, and Mind 3, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45977-6\_8

# **1 Introduction**

## *1.1 The Complement Coercion Phenomenon*

It has been proposed that verbs like *begin* and *enjoy* carry a selectional restriction and must combine with an event-denoting complement (Pustejovsky 1995; Jackendoff 1997). Evidence in support of this restriction comes from the observation that even in sentences where the complement denotes an individual of the ordinary sort, an eventive interpretation is obtained. For instance, the sentence in (1), despite containing an entity-denoting complement, *the book,* can be interpreted as making reference to some event involving a book with John as its agent. In (2) and (3), the selectional restrictions of *begin* are satisfied when it combines with the gerundival complement *reading the book* or an event-denoting nominal *the fight*.

This eventive interpretation associated with (1) has been interpreted in the literature as an instance of the broader phenomenon of **type coercion**. 1 The hypothesis is that there is a class of verbs that exclusively selects for event-denoting complements. This selectional restriction leads to a mismatch in the semantic representation when such verbs combine with complements denoting ordinary individuals. This mismatch is resolved by a semantic operation called *type*-*shifting* (Partee 1987; Partee and Rooth 1983) that coerces the semantic type of the entity-denoting complement into the appropriate event-denoting type (see Pylkkänen 2008 for a summary of descriptions of the hypothesis).

Experimental investigation of this phenomenon has revealed behavioral and neurological patterns that are taken to support this linguistic analysis. Psycholinguistic studies, using a variety of experimental paradigms, report that combining an entity-denoting complement with a coercion verb (*John began the book*) engenders more processing cost than combining it with a non-coercion verb (*John read/wrote the book*) during real-time comprehension (Baggio et al. 2010; Frisson and McElree 2008; Katsika et al. 2012; Lapata et al. 2003; McElree et al. 2001, 2006; Pickering et al. 2005, 2006; Scheepers et al. 2004, 2008; Traxler et al. 2002, 2005). On the neurolinguistic side, it has been found that the complement coercion effect recruits three distinct cortical regions: Wernicke's area (Piñango et al. 2001), ventro-medial

1 The term *coercion* is widely used to describe diverse phenomena in which it appears that interpretations are derived despite apparent semantic incongruity or mismatch between the combining expressions. The phenomena often considered under the coercion umbrella include nominal coercion with mass-count nominals (e.g. Pustejovsky 1995; Michaelis 2005; Wiese and Maling 2005), aspectual coercion with grammatical aspect (De Swart 1998) and aktionsart (e.g. Piñango et al. 1999; Todorova et al. 2000, Piñango and Zurif 2001; Piñango et al. 2006, Deo and Piñango 2011), and our present focus, complement coercion with complements of certain verbs.

prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) (Pylkkänen and McElree 2007; Pylkkänen et al. 2009), and BA45 (Husband et al. 2011). The additional cost has been interpreted as manifesting the type-shifting operation or the mechanism of building an eventive representation from an entity-denoting expression (Frisson and McElree 2008: 8; McElree et al. 2001: 22; Pickering et al. 2005: 9). The observed patterns in particular brain regions have been interpreted as evidence that these areas implement the operations of type-shifting and coercion.

## *1.2 Challenges to the Type-Shifting Hypothesis*

The type-shifting hypothesis is, at its core, a hypothesis about the lexical semantics of so-called "coercion verbs" and the conceptual entities that composition involving such verbs is sensitive to. We propose that this hypothesis as formulated faces at least three challenges which have direct implications for how the experimental results are interpreted.

The *first challenge* has to do with the underlying linguistic pattern. For at least aspectual verbs, the most representative subset of coercion verbs, the eventive interpretation is not obligatory in the presence of an entity-denoting complement. In their simple transitive uses, the context in which these verbs have been tested, aspectual verbs do not exclusively select for eventive complements and agentive subject-referents. Sentences (4)–(6), found in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), exemplify such cases. For example, there is no construal of (4) in which *the book* is coerced into an event of which *the new autobiographical memoir* is an agentive participant. The same is observed in (5); the sentence does not give rise to an eventive interpretation though the "coercion verb" is followed by an entity-denoting complement (*the genealogy of the kings of England*).2

2 A reviewer points out that the meaning of "*begin"* in these cases is similar to "open up" or "be the beginning of X," which would not be possible in (1) *John began the book,* thus leading to the possibility of two distinct uses of "*begin.*" On this point we observe this "open up" interpretation of "*begin*" can also apply to (1), giving rise to a metonymic reading such as "The story of John began the book." This is what we call the constitutive interpretation of sentences involving aspectual verbs with an animate subject. Under our proposed Structured Individual analysis, it is one of the plausible interpretations of the sentence (in addition to the more salient eventive interpretation paraphraseable as "John began reading the book"). So, under this view both readings are accounted for. Details are discussed in Sect. 1.3.

This observation has been elaborated on in Piñango and Deo (2015) who observe that "not only is there no eventive complement (syntactically explicit or coerced) in these examples, but the sentences themselves are aspectually stative, and it is more accurate to say that they report configurational relations between individuals rather than causal relations between events (*p.* 10)." These distributional and interpretational patterns for the subset of aspectual verbs cast doubt on the validity of the empirical generalization that underpins the type-shifting analysis.

The *second challenge* comes from distributional differences in the complements of coercion verbs. Reporting the results of a corpus-based study, Utt et al. (2013) found that aspectual verbs co-occur significantly more with event-denoting nominals (such as *fight* in (3)) than psychological verbs. They call such expressions event-nouns and define them as nouns denoting actions, cognitive processes, or biological processes. These findings, while not *incompatible* with an event-selecting lexical semantics for coercion verbs, are rather surprising. There should be no reason why psychological verbs, if they lexically select for event-denoting complements, occur far less frequently with such complements than aspectual verbs. Further, this differential frequency distribution suggests that if the type-shifting hypothesis is correct, then the nominal complements of psychological verbs must undergo coercion far more frequently than the nominal complements of aspectual verbs. This asymmetry between the two classes is not naturally reconcilable with the uniform event-selecting lexical semantics for aspectual and psychological verbs that the type-shifting hypothesis relies on.

Finally, the *third challenge* comes from real-time implementation of coercion. Specifically, Katsika et al. (2012) observe that the class of coercion verbs investigated in previous studies on complement coercion was not only semantically heterogeneous, including at least two distinctly separable subclasses—aspectual verbs (e.g. *begin, finish, start*) and psychological verbs (e.g. *enjoy, prefer, endure*),3 they also observed that when these two subclasses were separately studied, they exhibited distinct processing profiles. The coercion *effect* (increased cost sometime after the complement head) was observable with the aspectual verb set and not with the psychological verb set.4

3 The full class of coercion verbs investigated (in conflated fashion) also includes verbs like *master* and *attempt*. See Katsika et al. (2012).

4 Here we note that the psychological verb set examined in coercion studies only included a small set of possible psychological verbs guided by the V + V-ing paraphrase diagnostic: John enjoys the book = John enjoys reading the book. Crucially, even though all psychological verbs pass the diagnostic, the diagnostic brings out the eventive interpretation more saliently with some psychological verbs (e.g. *enjoy, endure*) than others (e.g. *love, like, hate*).

well as processing behavior, coercion verbs do not appear to form a unified class.5 In what follows, we present a hypothesis which on the basis of a new analysis for aspectual verbs (Piñango and Deo 2015) captures the pattern of real-time comprehension of aspectual verbs observed so far and makes further testable predictions; predictions which we then proceed to test from processing and neurological perspectives.

## *1.3 The Structured Individual (SI) Analysis*

Piñango and Deo (2015) propose that aspectual verbs lexically select for complements that are **structured individuals,** rather than events. This proposal is motivated by the goal of offering a unified analysis for both "coercion configuration" sentences like *John began the book* and sentences like *The chapter on global warming began the book* (similar examples were given (4)–(6), not part of the traditional coercion set). The intuition underpinning a structured individual is an ordinary entity that maps onto a one-dimensional directed path structure (one-dimensional DPS) along a range of dimensions. A one-dimensional directed path structure is defined, following Krifka (1998), as a totally ordered structure whose adjacent (non-overlapping) parts bear the precedence relation along some dimension (temporal, spatial, eventive, etc.). For instance, one may construe an

5 Two anonymous reviewers argue that these challenges do not necessarily falsify the type-shifting analysis, as the analysis can still be maintained by restricting the coercion phenomenon to the set of aspectual verbs and excluding psychological verbs and the remaining heterogenous set of verbs. One reviewer specifically suggests that the type-shifting account can restrict its claims to the combination consisting of an animate subject, an aspectual verb, and an entity-denoting object. If thus restricted, the processing cost can be accounted for through the following two steps: Step 1: type-shifting of the entity-denoting object, creating multiple possible eventive interpretations; and Step 2: event ambiguity resolution involving the selection of the proper event in context. We note two problems with this general option: First, the fundamental assumption on which the type-shifting analysis rests, which is that coercion verbs select for eventive arguments, is not valid, as demonstrated by examples (4–6). Without this assumption there is no motivation for type shifting (since the claim is that this mechanism is triggered by the presence of a mismatch). Hence, the processing cost induced by aspectual verbs (see Exp.1) remains unaccounted for as it cannot be attributed to the type-shifting operation (Step 1). As for Step 2, previous studies have already shown that the processing cost cannot be attributed to the selection of the right kind of event among plausible ones. Traxler et al. (2005) report that introducing a probable event prior to the target coercion sentence did not attenuate the cost. Also, Frisson and McElree (2008) indicate that coercion expressions with several alternative interpretations and no dominant one were not more taxing than expressions with a strong dominant interpretation. In their words, "one cannot reduce the cost of coercion to the more general effects of ambiguity or competition between different interpretations" and that the effects are "not likely to reflect costs associated with deriving an activity for the event sense." (Frisson and McElree 2008: 8).

entity like a bridge, which is a three-dimensional spatial entity, as mapping onto a line (a one-dimensional DPS) along its most *salient* dimension, say spatial (Jackendoff 1992; Verkuyl and Zwarts 1992). Similarly, the text of a book may be construed as a one-dimensional path structure along the informational dimension, taking its chapters as the adjacent parts. More examples from the COCA are given below further illustrating the intuition.

Following Gawron (2009) and Deo et al. (2013), Piñango and Deo (2015) call such one dimensional DPSs in any ontological domain an "**axis**." In defining the notion of a structured individual, they make reference to axes onto which individuals are mapped. This simply means that the individual is in a homomorphic relation to an (ontologically, conventionally, or pragmatically) given one-dimensional DPS. The predicate **axis** is taken to be the set of all entities (temporal, spatial, material, or abstract) that are one-dimensional DPSs. An axis is an element from this set.

Structured individuals are defined as entities that are relatable to such axes via homomorphic functions. The formal definition is given in (11). According to (11), an individual *x* of any type *τ* is taken to be a structured individual relative to a function *f* of any type (*τ, σ*) iff *f(x)* is an axis and *f* is a homomorphism from the part structure of *x* to the axis *f(x).*

(11) ∀*xτ* [**struct-ind***f*⟨*τ,σ*⟩ (*x*) ↔ [**axis**(*f*(*x*)) ∧ ∀*x* , *x*′′ ≤ *x* [*x*′ ≤ *x*′′ ↔ *f*(*x*′) ≤ *f*(*x*′′)]]] (Piñango and Deo 2015)

Aspectual verbs are analyzed as having both a presuppositional and truth-conditional component. They carry a lexical presupposition that requires their complement denotation to be a structured individual. Truth-conditionally, they require the subject to map onto some privileged small subpart of the axis determined by the complement denotation. A sentence with an aspectual verb is true iff the subject denotation is construed as a specific (e.g. initial, medial, final) subpart of the axis that the complement denotation is mapped to.

The sample lexical entry for *begin* in (12) (P & D 2015), illustrates this general schema assumed for aspectual verbs. The function (*f*c) that maps the complement denotation to the axis comes from a (lexically encoded) set of functions each associated with a dimension. The idea encapsulated in the definition is that aspectual verbs are sensitive to whether their complement denotation can be construed in context as a structured individual, i.e. whether it is possible given contextual information to map it to an axis along some dimension. The contextually accessed function *f*c reflects this contextual reliance. Once the presupposition that the complement denotes a structured individual is met, aspectual verbs require that there be some function *f'* (∃*f )* such that it maps the subject denotation to a small initial part (< small-init) of the axis given by *fc*(*x*).6

	- b. *Begin(x)(y)* is defined iff *x* is a structured individual with respect to the contextually determined function *fc*. If defined, *begin(x)(y)* is true iff there is some function *f* (possibly identical to *fc*) such that *f (y)* is a small initial subpart of the axis *fc*(*x*). (Piñango and Deo 2015)

With this generalized lexical meaning, aspectual verbs are able to combine with arguments of different semantic types to yield a range of possible interpretations.

Consider the example in (7):

(7) *A moving train finishes the display.* (Spatial part)

In (7), the complement (*the display*) is construable as a structured individual along the spatial dimension, mapping via the spatial trace function *σ* to its spatial extent—yielding an axis along the spatial dimension—the spatial extent of the display. The sentence is true iff the spatial extent of the entity denoted by *a moving train* is a small final subpart of the axis that the display maps onto along the spatial dimension.

The selection of the functions that map the complement denotation and the subject denotation to the axis is constrained by both the properties of the complement and context. The lexical meaning of the complement must encode information about the possible dimensions that are relevant to understanding the concept denoted by the complement. For instance, an expression like *magazine* must contain information about its spatial as well as informational structure; expressions like *bridge* and *river* must contain the information that they have a salient spatial dimension. This information will be mined during composition with aspectual verbs

6 Notice that it is not necessary that the subject denotation and the complement denotation be mapped to the axis by the same function. The complement denotation maps to the axis by the contextually given function *fc* while the function that maps the subject denotation to the axis may be distinct from it (hence the existential quantification over the function that associates the subject denotation to the axis). This separation between the two functions is motivated by examples like "*A veritable lineup of our planetary neighbors begins the month of March*," where the subject denotation is best understood as an event while the complement denotes a temporal interval. In this case, the temporal dimension from the complement (obtained by the identity function) is mapped to the axis, while the function that maps the subject denotation to the axis is the runtime function **τ**, that maps events to their runtime. The coercion configuration also maps the complement denotation and the subject denotation to the eventuality axis via non-identical functions, as we describe later in this section. See Piñango and Deo (2015) for the detailed implementation.

(and probably in other cases as well), for determining the dimension along which the complement is to be construed as a structured individual in a given context.

The structured individual analysis treats the meanings of sentences containing aspectual verbs to be underdetermined, with full determination being dependent on which dimension is chosen for interpretation in a given context. Take "*The tedious preface begins the novel*" for an example. Here the complement can be conceptualized as a body of informational content—an axis along the informational dimension. *The tedious preface* maps to its informational content and is asserted to be a small initial subpart of the informational content of the novel. In the informational dimension, the physical form (e.g. size, number of pages) of the novel is irrelevant. It does not matter which page the content of preface appears on; the preface could be printed on page 5, preceded by the title page, the copyright page, or the table of contents. Since the truth of the sentence is determined by the informational extent of the two arguments, it is possible that the sentence is false on the spatial interpretation, in which the preface is printed on page 5. On the other hand, the novel can be conceptualized as a spatial entity—an axis along the spatial dimension, in which the novel denotes a structured individual consisting of physical pages of a particular size, with a pagination order. In the spatial dimension, the sentence is true iff the preface is printed on the first page of the novel. A printer might say something like "*It is weird that, instead of the half*-*title and the copyright page, it is the preface that begins the novel.*" In this context, no reference is made to the informational content of the preface.

Given that entity-denoting expressions may map onto axes in multiple dimensions, comprehenders must rely on the context to determine the exact function that determines the dimension along which the axis is construed. In the context of formatting or printing the novel, the spatial dimension will be chosen; in the context of reading the novel, the informational dimension is more relevant, and therefore the more salient dimension.

The "coercion" uses of aspectual verbs are naturally accommodated within this general analysis. This configuration is characterizable as one in which an aspectual verb combines with an animate agentive argument and an entity-denoting complement with the resulting reading that the animate subject referent is the agent of some implicit dynamic eventuality. These cases are analyzed as involving functions that map entities to the events that they are participants of—inverse thematic functions. While thematic roles (e.g. *agent, patient, theme*) map events to their participants as the actor or undergoer, inverse thematic functions are defined as functions that "map pairs of individuals and times to the smallest event that the individual bears a participant role to at that time in a given context" (Piñango and Deo 2015). So in an intuitive way, inverse thematic functions are ways of accessing events via the individuals that participate in them, rather than accessing individuals via the participant role that they bear in an event. *fagi* maps an individual to the smallest event that they are the agentive participant of at the reference interval *i* in a given context. *fthi* maps an individual to the smallest event that they are the patient/theme of at *i* in a given context.

The salient reading for a sentence like "*Jane Austen began the anthology"* is one that involves an eventive dimension (*Jane Austen began reading/writing/etc… the anthology*). In this case, the axis is construed as some event of which Jane Austen and the anthology are participants. The function *fc* is taken to be *fthi* , which maps the complement, the anthology (as a structured individual), to the smallest event of which it is the theme at the reference time. The subject, Jane Austen, is mapped to the smallest event of which it is the agent by the inverse thematic function *fagi* . The sentence comes out true if the smallest event of which *Jane Austen* is an agentive participant at a reference interval *i* in a given context is a small initial part of the event of which the book is a theme participant at *i*. This is the **agentive** reading of the sentence.

However, the sentence also has another, **constitutive**, and reading where the individuals, *Jane Austen*, and *the anthology,* get mapped to an informational axis, such that the informational content corresponding to Jane Austen is understood to be a small initial subpart of the informational content corresponding to the anthology. In order to achieve this interpretation, metonymy has to be applied onto the subject, yielding an interpretation that may be paraphrased as [*the work of Jane Austen*] *began* the anthology.

Although one reading might appear to be more salient than the other, the agentive and constitutive readings are both possible in principle and are determined based on context and plausibility. Thus the indeterminacy of interpretation (agentive and constitutive) also extends to aspectual verb sentences in the coercion configuration.

The underspecification of meanings for aspectual verbs in the proposed analysis may give rise to a concern that the Structured Individual analysis may over-generalize. Indeed, a reviewer notes that sentences like "*The jogger began the bridge*" sound awkward but are, in fact, predicted to be acceptable by our analysis, given the spatial structure of the bridge. We agree that such sentences are predicted to be acceptable and note that, given the right context, such readings do become available. Consider, for example, the web-attested sentences (13–14).

Here, we note that the Structured Individual analysis, in fact, *constrains* the properties of the eventuality that is construed as the relevant axis in the coercion configuration. This is because the structured individual presupposition requires that the contextually determined *f*s be a homomorphism from the part structure of the complement denotation to the part structure of the axis. The axial eventuality must therefore be one in which the part structure of the complement denotation is incrementally related to the course of the event—that is, the complement of *begin*, *finish*, etc. must be interpreted as an incremental theme argument of the implicitly construed eventuality. This is indeed the case with coercion sentences like *John began the book*—which cannot make reference to an event in which the book is not construed incrementally (such as an event of John playing with or seeing the book). This incrementality constraint on the interpretation of the eventuality associated with aspectual verbs in the coercion configuration falls out as a natural consequence of the lexical meanings for aspectual verbs assumed in the Structured Individual analysis—but must be stipulated in a type-shifting semantics for these verbs.

To summarize, the Structured Individual analysis not only grounds the lexical meanings proposed (i.e., dimension functions) on independently motivated conceptual properties, it makes no assumptions about selectional restrictions with respect to events. Therefore, under this analysis, the comprehension of aspectual verbs requires neither a type mismatch nor the implementation of a type-shifting operation. Instead, under this analysis, aspectual verbs combine with their complements and subjects just like other transitive verbs, but their full interpretation requires the contextual resolution of the specific dimension along which the complement can be construed as a structured individual. We call this process the resolution of dimensional ambiguity.

The analysis leads to a hypothesis about the processing of aspectual verbs which we term the **Structured Individual (SI) hypothesis**. On this hypothesis, the observed psycho- and neuro-linguistic reflexes of complement coercion are taken to reflect not type-shifting operations but the retrieval of the potential dimension-functions and the ultimate dimensional resolution. This allows us to not only maintain a uniform semantics for aspectual verbs across its uses (viz. agentive and constitutive readings), but also captures the observation from Katsika et al. (2012) that aspectual verbs, but not psychological verbs, engender additional cost.

Under the Structured Individual hypothesis, the processing of aspectual verbs is implemented in real-time comprehension as follows:

**Schema 1** Processing of aspectual verbs

as a structured individual along the dimension associated with that function. This is an instance of **ambiguity resolution**. These two processes are described in Schema 1. 78

According to this analysis then, resolving *any* sentence containing an aspectual verb requires the above two processes; processes that have been previously and independently invoked to capture semantic composition effects: (A) exhaustive activation of the verb's lexical functions (e.g. Shapiro et al. 19899 ), and (B) resolution of ambiguity created by immediate composition demands, i.e. dimension extraction from the complement (e.g. Frazier and Rayner 199010).

(i) *Black starts and ends the visible spectrum*.

7 As Schema 1 shows, the ambiguity resolution involves deciding between the dimensions along which the structured individual associated with the complement denotation will be construed. Crucially, one of these dimensions can be eventive, leading to the standard coercion reading. As Frisson and McElree (2008) have shown, the kind of ambiguity between, say, *reading the anthology* versus *writing the anthology*, is not expected to contribute to cost.

8 The lexical functions and the ontological dimensions listed here are not exhaustive. Piñango and Deo (2015) indicate that the dimensions can be "more abstract than that of space, time, or pieces of text." Consider their examples (web-attested):

(ii) *…. the 6 neighborhoods based on social status (on a scale of 1 to 6): 1 is the poorest and the most dangerous of the neighborhood, 4 begins the middle class…*.

Sentence (i) makes reference to "an ordering of electromagnetic radiation corresponding to the visible spectrum by wavelength" and (ii), to social status.

9 This study shows that verbs with more possible argument structure arrangements (dative verbs) increased response time to the secondary lexical decision task than those with fewer possible arrangements (transitive verbs), regardless of the context. The authors therefore suggest that all the argument structure information of a verb must be momentarily activated during real-time processing.

10They found that delaying the disambiguation information for sentences that contain a word with multiple meanings increased processing cost.

We propose here that the "coercion" cost previously observed arises from the processing of aspectual verbs, the best represented verb class tested among the verbs tested in the past. In addition, we hypothesize that the seemingly incongruent neurological patterns previously associated with complement coercion, are in fact consistent with both step (A) and step (B).

In what follows, we present the results of two experimental studies that examine the psychological and neurological viability of the Structured Individual hypothesis (and ultimately the Structured Individual analysis). To this end, we carry out two experiments using self-paced reading (Exp. 1) and fMRI (Exp. 2) respectively, along with a pretest questionnaire. Three verb types are considered: aspectual verbs (AspectualV), psychological verbs of the *enjoy*-"type" (EnjoyingV) (these include only those psychological verbs that were tested as coercion verbs in previous work (see Katsika et al. 2012 for details)) and psychological verbs of the *love*-"type" (LovingV), which have been previously claimed to involve no coercion (Pustejovsky 1995) and thereby serve as controls. The three conditions all contain sentences with an animate subject and an entity-denoting complement.

Based on the Structured Individual hypothesis, we predict that aspectual verbs will induce longer reading times than either type of psychological verbs in the self-paced reading because the former involve the resolution of dimension ambiguity. With respect to neural correlates, we expect aspectual verbs to recruit additional cortical areas at two positions corresponding to the two processes mentioned above: (a) when the subject combines with an aspectual verb, where the parser exhausts the verb's lexical functions, and (b) when the aspectual verb combines with the complement, where the parser must mine the complement denotation to determine the possible dimensions along which it is construable as a structured individual (Schema 1).

## **2 Pretest: Norming Questionnaire**

To ensure equal acceptability of the manipulated conditions, we employed a rating questionnaire to test the stimuli.

## *2.1 Method*

#### **2.1.1 Participants**

Forty native speakers of American English took the questionnaire, all between the ages of 18–30 and without reading disabilities. The data of three participants were discarded because their responses were either undifferentiated or inconsistent.

#### **2.1.2 Materials**

We created 50 triplets; each containing the three manipulated conditions as shown in Table 1. Aspectual verbs (AspectualV) were contrasted with psychological verbs of the *enjoy* type (EnjoyingV). Note that the two are collapsed as "coercion verbs" under the type-shifting account. We further introduced psychological verbs of the *love*-type as the control condition (LovingV). Under the type-shifting hypothesis, EnjoyingV and LovingV are taken to differ in that only the former exclusively selects for eventive complements whereas the latter does not. From our perspective, both EnjoyingV and LovingV are psychological verbs. We have no independent reason to say that the two differ in terms of lexical semantics. The reason we separate them here is because the verbs in the EnjoyingV condition have been tested in the literature as "coercion verbs" while those included in the LovingV set have not. Part of the contribution of Experiment 1 (Sect. 3) is to determine if there could be processing differences between these two sets at all that could warrant two different linguistic treatments.

Aside from the 50 triplets, we introduced 150 filler sentences (50 of them were nonsensical sentences); the whole set of the stimuli amounted to 300 sentences. The 50 triplets were split into two lists, each list containing 25 triplets of the three conditions along with half of the fillers. Each list was assigned to 20 participants, and each participant received a unique pseudo-randomization of her corresponding list.

#### **2.1.3 Procedures**

The participants were asked to rate the acceptability of each sentence on a 1–5 scale (1 = does not make sense; 5 = makes sense) and answer a multiple-choice, multiple-answer question probing possible interpretations.

## *2.2 Results*

Results from the means (Table 2) show that the three conditions were within the acceptable range.

Repeated measures Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) revealed an effect of condition (*F*(2, 72) = 32.59, *p* < 0.001). Planned pairwise comparisons indicated that LovingV was rated significantly higher than both AspectualV and EnjoyingV respectively (both

*p*s < 0.001).11 Crucially, no difference was found between the AspectualV and EnjoyingV conditions (*p* > 0.05). In addition, we performed a reliability test on the items within each condition to evaluate their internal consistency. The reliability results showed that the items used in each condition were highly reliable (Cronbach's alpha: AspectualV = 0.92; EnjoyingV = 0.85; LovingV = 0.72). This means that, while each condition contained 50 items (sentences), the items within each condition were closely related as a group, yielding similar responses.

# **3 Experiment 1: Self-paced Reading**

We conducted a self-paced reading experiment with a moving window paradigm to investigate the time-course of the cost underlying the processing of aspectual verbs and psychological verbs.

# *3.1 Method*

#### **3.1.1 Participants**

Twenty-eight native speakers of American English were recruited, all between the ages of 18–30 and with normal vision and auditory acuity. None of them had history of reading disabilities.

#### **3.1.2 Materials**

The materials were adapted from the pretest questionnaire. The script contained 50 triplets, each consisting of the three conditions, and 150 filler sentences (among

11We attribute the difference in rating scores between LovingVs in one hand, and the other two conditions on the other hand as a difference in familiarity induced by frequency. Verbs like *love*, *like*, *dislike* have higher frequencies of use in the language, which means that the participants are more likely to have come across these verbs in a greater variety of contexts and thus building a greater familiarity with the usage. Indeed, a closer look at the frequency distribution via Corpus of Contemporary American English suggests that LovingVs such as *loved* (42630)*, liked* (32715)*, disliked* (1522), *hated* (10900) have higher frequencies (in parentheses) than EnjoyingVs such as *enjoyed* (16000), *preferred* (12438), *favored* (7637), and *tolerated* (2187).

**Table 3** Example of a set of experimental sentences and segmentations

which 100 were nonsensical). Each participant saw all the 300 sentences during the experiment. Each sentence was segmented into several windows as shown in Table 3. Our windows of interest were the Verb, Complement head, Head+1, and Head+2 regions.

The verbs used (and their frequencies) in the stimuli are the following: AspectualVs included *start* (12), *begin* (13), *finish* (12), *continue* (9), *complete* (3), *end* (1). EnjoyingVs included *enjoy* (14), *prefer* (10), *favor* (9), *tolerate* (8), *endure* (8), *resist* (1). These verbs were adopted from previous studies and have been used in Katsika et al. (2012). LovingVs included *love* (13), *like* (12), *dislike* (8), *hate* (5), *detest* (5), *approve of* (3), *be fond of* (2), *disapprove of* (1), *respect* (1). All verbs in the three conditions were matched by reaction times from an independent lexical decision study carried out in our lab (DiNardo, unpublished thesis). It showed no difference in accessing times among AspectualVs (465.77 ms), EnjoyingVs (454.46 ms), and LovingVs12 (488 ms), all *p*s > 0.05.

#### **3.1.3 Procedure**

The stimuli were presented in black Courier New font in the center of a computer screen with a white background. The participants read the sentences segment by segment at their own pace, which allowed them to fully understand the sentences' meanings. Every trial began with a series of dash lines, with a "+" sign at the left edge of the screen, signaling the starting point of the sentence. The participants began by pressing the space bar, causing the first segment to show up. With the subsequent press, the next word appeared, and the previous segment was replaced by a set of dashes. At the end of the sentence, they were presented a statement probing either the content or the acceptability of the sentence just read to ensure full comprehension. The participants responded by pressing the "Agree" or "Disagree" key on the keyboard. A practice session was given beforehand; the participants had to reach 80% accuracy in the comprehension task before proceeding to the real trials.

12The only item (of the LovingV condition) not included in this lexical decision study is "*be fond of*," whose length affects RTs.

#### **3.1.4 Data Analysis**

All 28 participants recruited were taken into account in the data analysis; none was excluded. We performed a mixed model analysis, incorporating a fixed effect of *condition* (3 levels: AspectualV, EnjoyingV, LovingV) and random intercepts for *subject* and *item*. Analyses were carried out in the R statistical environment, using the *lmer* function in the *lme4* packages (Baayen et al. 2008; R Development Core Team 2014). The reading time measure was evaluated by contrasting a model including condition as the predictor against a base model without it. This contrast shows whether there is a significant effect of condition. For the pairwise comparisons, the *p*-values were corrected by Tukey tests, and the *b* values represent the unstandardized coefficients. All significant contrasts are reported.

## *3.2 Results*

The accuracy of the comprehension task was 95.03%. Results of the reading task are reported in Table 4 and Fig. 1. A marginally significant effect of condition was found at the verb (χ2 (2) = 5.475, *p* = 0.0647: AspectualV/EnjoyingV > LovingV) which went away at the complement head (χ2 (2) = 1.445, *p* = 0.486). Sustained significant differences appeared instead at the Head+1 and Head+2 positions.

At the Head+1 position, there was a significant effect of condition (χ2 (2) = 14.315, *p* < 0.001). The pairwise comparisons indicate that AspectualV engendered significantly longer reading times (RTs) than EnjoyingV (*b* = 18.301, *p* = 0.036) and LovingV (*b* = 27.581, *p* < 0.001) respectively.

The Head+2 position revealed the same pattern. A significant effect of condition was found (χ2 (2) = 11.197, *p* = 0.004). The pairwise comparisons suggest that AspectualV engendered longer RTs than both EnjoyingV (*b* = 27.172 *p* = 0.011) and LovingV (*b* = 27.504, *p* = 0.010).

Overall, the results indicate that aspectual verbs induced longer RTs than both the *enjoy*-type and the *love*-type of psychological verbs at the two windows following the complement head, while the two types of psychological verbs did not differ from each other. These results replicate Katsika et al.'s (2012) and Utt et al. (2013) findings, and further show that psychological verbs behave as a class in terms of processing profile. We interpret these findings as suggesting that the unique cost observed for aspectual verbs, but not psychological verbs (EnjoyingV

**Table 4** Results of reading times in millisecond (standard errors in parenthesis)

**Fig. 1** Results of reading times (ms); error bars: ± 1 standard error of the means

and LovingV), is due to the specific interpretive requirements of the aspectual verb class: the determination among multiple possibilities of the dimension (e.g. *eventive*, *informational, spatial*) along which the structured individual associated with the complement denotation must be construed. Crucially, this determination is required; failure to resolve the ambiguity leads to failure to interpret the sentence.13

# **4 Experiment 2: fMRI**

Previous neurological studies of the complement coercion effect report activity in three distinct brain regions: Wernicke's area in Piñango et al. (2001) lesion study, ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in Pylkkänen and McElree's (2007) MEG study, and BA45 in Husband et al.'s (2011) fMRI experiment. Despite the discrepant results, all these studies attribute the effect to type-shifting the complement to obtain an event interpretation. Notice that these experiments are subject to the heterogeneous stimuli problem, mixing aspectual verbs, psychological verbs, and

13Two anonymous reviewers suggest that these results in themselves are still consistent with the type-shifting account provided that coercion is restricted to aspectual verbs. In footnote 5 above we pointed out one key problem with this solution. Here we also note that the failure of the EnjoyingV condition (composed strictly by those psychological verbs previously claimed to be coercion verbs) to behave differently from the LovingV condition represents a further argument against the type-shifting account, since the verbs in the EnjoyingV condition but not in the LovingV condition passed what had been proposed as the main diagnostic for coercion: participation in the [V + V-ing] paraphrase. What the unified behavior of the psychological verbs in the SPR shows is that this diagnostic is not restrictable to aspectual verbs (since EnjoyingVs pass it) and therefore not adequate for the characterization of the coercion effect understood in terms of mismatch and repair via type-shifting.

control verbs (e.g. *master, try*). Yet as mentioned, recent studies (Katsika et al. 2012; Utt et al. 2013) indicate that only aspectual verbs engender additional cost. On the other hand, the Structured Individual hypothesis accounts for the complement coercion effect as the processing of aspectual verbs. In our fMRI experiment, we aim to investigate its neural basis, expecting to find brain activity corresponding to the two hypothesized processes associated with it.

# *4.1 Method*

#### **4.1.1 Participants**

Sixteen native speakers of American English participated this study, all between the ages of 18–30, right-handed, without reading disabilities or history of neurological disorders. The data from one participant were excluded from the analysis due to severe head movement.

#### **4.1.2 Materials**

The stimuli were the same as the self-paced reading experiment, with a different set of fillers. The 50 triplets and 150 fillers yielded 300 sentences in total. Each participant saw all 300 sentences.

#### **4.1.3 Experimental Design**

We used an event-related paradigm. The stimuli were visually presented segment-by-segment as in the self-paced reading experiment, each lasting for 500 ms. For 75% of the sentences, the participants were queried with a yes/no comprehension question, which lasted for 4000 ms. There was a 500 ms interval between the sentence-final word and the comprehension question following the sentence.

The total 300 sentences were divided into 10 runs. The stimuli were pseudo-randomized such that no successive sentences were of the same condition. Each run contained 30 sentences and lasted 5 min 33 s with the inclusion of the machine connection delay.14

14This included the time to connect the stimulus presentation software (E-Prime) and the MRI scanner.

#### **4.1.4 Imaging Acquisition**

*Anatomical Measurements*: The fMRI experiment was performed on a Siemens Sonata; 3T whole body MRI scanner (Erlangen, Germany). Each session began with a 3-plane localizer followed by a sagittal localizer, and an inversion recovery T1 weighted scan (TE/TR = 2.61/285 ms, matrix 192 × 192, FOV = 220 mm, flip angle = 70°, bandwidth = 501 Hz/pix, 51 slices with 2.5 mm thickness). This acquisition was used to define the AC-PC (anterior and posterior commissure) line for prescription of the anatomic T1 images and functional images in the following series.

*Functional measurements*: During the task, we conducted event-related functional MRI using gradient echo echo-planar imaging (EPI) blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) contrast, with TE = 30 ms, TR = 956 ms, matrix 84 × 84, FOV = 210 mm, flip angle = 62°, bandwidth = 2289 Hz/pixel, slice thickness = 2.5 mm, with 321 measurements (images per slice). The scanner was set to trigger the stimulus presentation program, which enabled the image acquisition to be synchronized with the stimulus presentation.

At the end of the functional imaging, a high-resolution 3D Magnetization Prepared Rapid Gradient Echo (MPRAGE) was used to acquire sagittal images for multi-subject registration, with TE = 2.77 ms, TR = 2530 ms, acquisition matrix 256 × 256, FOV = 256 mm, bandwidth = 179 Hz/pix, flip angle = 7°, 176 slices with slice thickness = 1 mm (the fMRI data within subjects was registered to this brain volume, which was then registered across subjects into a common 3D brain space using the Yale BioImage Suite software package (Papademetris et al. 2006).

#### **4.1.5 fMRI Data Analysis**

All data were converted from Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) format to analyze format using XMedCon (Nolfe et al. 2003). During the conversion process, the first 6 images at the beginning of each of the 10 functional runs were discarded to enable the signal to achieve steady-state equilibrium between radio frequency pulsing and relaxation, leaving 315 images per slice per run for analysis. Functional images were motion-corrected with the Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) 5 algorithm (http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/software/ spm5) for three translational directions (x, y or z) and three possible rotations (pitch, yaw or roll). Trials with linear motion that had a displacement in excess of 1.5 mm

**Table 5** Event segmentation in the fMRI experiment

or rotation in excess of 2° were rejected. All further analyses were performed using BioImage Suite (http://bioimagesuite.org, Papademetris et al. 2006).

Individual subject data was analyzed using a General Linear Model (GLM) on each voxel in the entire brain volume with regressors specific for each task. For each of the 3 sentence types (AspectualV, EnjoyingV, LovingV) there were two regressors for two events, as shown in Table 5. These events correspond to the two hypothesized processes induced by aspectual verbs under the SI hypothesis. **Event 1** included the onset of the subject phrase and the offset of the verb; **Event 2** included the onset of the complement until the offset of the sentence-final word. We hypothesize that the exhaustive activation of an aspectual verb's functions takes place at Event 1 when readers encounter the verb and that readers attempt to determine the dimension along which the complement is construed as a structured individual at Event 2 while facing the dimension ambiguity in sentences with aspectual verbs.

The resulting beta images for each task were spatially smoothed with a 6 mm Gaussian kernel to account for variations in the location of activation across subjects. The output maps were normalized beta-maps, which were in the acquired space (2.5 mm × 2.5 mm × 2.5 mm).

To take these data into a common reference space, three registrations were calculated within the Yale BioImage Suite software package. The first registration performed a linear registration between the individual subject raw functional image and that subject's 2D anatomical image. The 2D anatomical image was then linearly registered to the individual's 3D anatomical image. The 3D differs from the 2D in that it has a 1 × 1 × 1 mm resolution whereas the 2D z-dimension is set by slice-thickness and its x-y dimensions are set by voxel size. Finally, a non-linear registration was computed between the individual 3D anatomical image and a reference 3D image. The reference brain used was the Colin27 Brain (Holmes et al. 1998) in Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) space (Evans et al. 1992). All three registrations were applied sequentially to the individual normalized beta-maps to bring all data into the common reference space.

Data were corrected for multiple comparisons by spatial extent of contiguous suprathresholded individual voxels at an experiment-wise *p* < 0.05. In a Monte Carlo simulation within the AFNI software package and using a smoothing kernel of 6 mm and a connection radius of 4.33 mm on 2.5 mm × 2.5 mm × 2.5 mm voxels, it was determined that an activation volume of 183 original voxels (4953 microliters) satisfied the p < 0.05 threshold. Clusters were created for each of the subtractions. Each cluster was identified with a region label, and then associated with additional numeral labels corresponding to Brodmann areas.

# *4.2 Results*

#### **4.2.1 Behavioral Results**

The overall accuracy of the comprehension task was 88.6%. The response times (RTs) for the questions are shown in Table 6. Results of repeated measures ANOVA (trials with no response were excluded) revealed no significant effect of conditions in RTs (*F*(2, 28) = 2.786, *p* = 0.08).

**Fig. 2** AspectualV > EnjoyingV at Event 1 (Subject + Verb): activations in left BA 40 (Wernicke's area), bilateral BA7, bilateral BA 6/24, and bilateral primary sensory areas

**Table 7** Summary of the results of the fMRI experiment (significant activations)

**Table 8** The differentially active regions of the AspectualV—EnjoyingV at Event 1(Subject+Verb). L = left, R = right, AntCingulate = anterior cingulate, PrimSensory = primary sensory cortex, Prim\_Motor = primary motor cortex

**Table 9** The differentially active regions of the AspectualV—LovingV at Event 2(Complement ∼S-final) L = left, R = right, IFG = inferior frontal gyrus, AntCingulate = anterior cingulate

#### **4.2.2 Imaging Results**

The imaging results showed that, at **Event 1** (Subject + Verb), AspectualV preferentially recruited Wernicke's area (BA40), bilateral BA7, 6, 24, and primary sensory areas over EnjoyingV (Fig. 2). At **Event 2** (Complement ∼ Sentence-final), AspectualV preferentially recruited the left inferior frontal cortex (LIFC), including BA44, 45, 47, and left insula, as well as bilateral BA6, right BA8, right inferior frontal cortex, and primary visual cortex over the control LovingV (Fig. 3). These results are summarized in Tables 7, 8 and 9.

Overall, the fMRI results reveal that at Event 1 (Subject + Verb) AspectualV shows preferential recruitment in Wernicke's area (BA 40) over EnjoyingV (Fig. 2) whereas at Event 2 (complement phrase), preferential recruitment for AspectualV (over LovingV) shifts to left inferior frontal cortex (Fig. 3).

## **5 Discussion**

Experiment 1 (self-paced reading) showed that the AspectualV condition engendered longer reading times than psychological verbs (EnjoyingV and LovingV) during real-time comprehension after the complement head was encountered, thus replicating and expanding on Katsika et al.'s (2012) and Utt et al.'s (2013) findings. These observations call into question our traditional understanding of the "complement coercion" phenomenon. The fact that aspectual and psychological verbs show not only distinct linguistic behaviors but also computationally distinct processing profiles suggests that the set of "coercion verbs" studied in previous work collapses at least two semantically distinct classes of verbs. These observations are in principle inconsistent with the type-shifting hypothesis, which predicts processing cost at least for those psychological verbs that fall in the coercion set—a prediction that is not supported by the results.

In order to account for this pattern of results, we propose the Structured Individual hypothesis (based on the Structured Individual analysis for aspectual verbs) whereby the processing cost associated with aspectual verbs results from (A) exhaustively retrieving the possible functions stored in the verb, and (B) the resolution of dimension ambiguity (e.g. *spatial, temporal, informational, eventive*) that is required to interpret the complement and consequently, the full sentence. According to this hypothesis, the dimension is identified when the complement head denoting a structured individual is encountered and the dimension along which this structure must be mapped onto the axis is determined.15

We already find initial support for this general approach in previously puzzling findings. Traxler et al. (2005) show that a prior context sentence that either contained the same coercion verb or explicitly mentioned the event structure attenuated the cost in the following target sentence.

(15) Context: *The student started/read a book…* Target: *Before he started/read the book…*

In their eye-tracking experiment, when either "*started a book*" or "*read a book*" is given in the context sentence, there was no difference between "*started the book*" and "*read the book*" in the target sentences. The Structured Individual

15Crucially, the dimension ambiguity resolution engendered by aspectual verbs is distinct from inferencing the specific activity associated with the complement in the agentive interpretation in the eventive dimension. Indeed, Frisson and McElree (2008) argue that the complement coercion effect is not modulated by competition or selection/retrieval of a particular event. In their eye-movement experiment, strongly preferred coercion sentences (*The teenager began the novel…*) did not differ from weakly preferred ones (*The waitress started the coffee…*). This suggests that the coercion cost is not modulated by the preference of interpretation or the number of different interpretations. In fact, both the strongly and weakly preferred sentences in their experiment involve aspectual verbs and animate subjects. Under the SI hypothesis, both sentences give rise to an ambiguity along different dimensions (e.g. informational, temporal, or eventive), and therefore cost emerges independent of the preference, as it is observed.

(SI) hypothesis captures this naturally: because the proper interpretation among multiple ones is contextually determined, a context sentence that biases the interpretation towards a certain dimension (likely the eventive dimension in this case) resolves the dimension ambiguity associated with aspectual verbs and therefore attenuates the cost.

A seemingly problematic finding for the SI hypothesis is Traxler et al.'s (2002) results. They show that, following coercion verbs (including both aspectual and psychological), entity-denoting complements (*started the puzzle*) induced more processing cost than event-denoting complements (*started the fight*). This may seem to go against the SI hypothesis, which states that any sentence containing aspectual verbs (including those with eventive complements) will require both exhaustive dimension-function retrieval and dimension-ambiguity resolution (the two potential sources of cost). The SI hypothesis accounts for this reported difference as an attenuation of the effect brought about by a pre-determination of the intended dimension along which the structured individual must be construed. Recall that the objective of interpreting AspectualV sentences is to decide the exact dimension along which the structured individual is construed. In cases like *started the fight*, the event-denoting complement ("*fight*") determines, or strongly biases towards, the eventive dimension along which a structured individual is construed. Because the dimension along which the structured individual must be construed is already determined by the eventive complement, the effort of resolving the dimension ambiguity (process B) is decreased, thus the observable cost of the composition is attenuated.

We focus now on Experiment 2 (fMRI), which shows that aspectual verbs induced preferential recruitment of the left posterior superior temporo-parietal cortex (i.e. Wernicke's area, BA40) when readers encountered the verb and the left inferior frontal cortex (i.e. Broca's area) when readers encountered the complement, over each of the psychological conditions (*enjoy*-type and *love*-type respectively). The Structured Individual hypothesis captures these patterns as follows: At **Event 1**, **BA40** (green circles in Fig. 2) reflects the exhaustive activation of the aspectual verb's dimension functions. The reason that aspectual verbs would engage this cortical region above and beyond the engagement induced by the EnjoyingV condition is presumably that only the former must encode discrete, pre-specified, functions. This encoding represents a measure of complexity and therefore of cost. This interpretation of Wernicke's area is consistent with previous work showing not only that it is involved in the retrieval of lexico-semantic representations (Badre et al. 2005; Binder et al. 2009; Damasio et al. 1996; Hickok and Poeppel 2004, 2007; Humphries et al. 2007; Lau et al. 2008) but also as Shapiro et al. (1993) show through a Broca's versus Wernicke's comparison, that this cortical region is specifically involved in exhaustive retrieval of lexical items during comprehension.

The activation of the precuneus (BA 7) (pink circles in Fig. 2), which was also preferentially recruited for AspectualV at Event 1, although not initially expected given previous neurolinguistic work on complement coercion, is completely consistent with our view of the fundamental meaning of aspectual verbs. This cortical region is reported to support spatio-temporal tasks such as processing visual-spatial information in perception and memory, especially spatial representation of sequential movements (Cavanna and Trimble 2006; Fletcher et al. 1995; Wallentin et al. 2008). We therefore interpret the recruitment of BA7 for aspectual verbs over psychological verbs as reflecting axial conceptualization associated with the set of dimension functions, one of which will ultimately map the structured individual onto an axis. The activation of BA40 and BA7 combined is correlated with dimension function retrieval, which in the absence of a complement is still underdetermined. These observations are clearly grounded in the basic principles of the SI hypothesis, and in this way support it. By contrast, they are not naturally connectable to the type-shifting approach, which by its very nature is expected to target only one cortical region, and cannot be naturally connected to spatial conceptualization.

The neurological patterns discussed in the paper are those that can be clearly interpreted in the context of the comparison between the Structured Individual hypothesis and the Type-Shifting hypothesis. To the extent that EnjoyingV shows different patterns from AspectualV, we interpret the results as suggesting that the two sets of verbs do not belong to a unified class.

At **Event 2**, the LIF cortex and insula activations (green in Fig. 3) are taken to reflect the process of determining the dimension along which the complement denotation is structured. This is not an unexpected activation pattern given that the LIF cortex has in the past been reported to support certain kinds of ambiguity resolution (e.g. Badre et al. 2005; Krain et al. 2006; Lau et al. 2008; Rodd et al. 2010). In particular, several studies have reported that the insula is involved in processing of time. For instance, in an fMRI study using prismatic adaptation (PA)16, Magnani et al. (2014) had participants perform a time reproduction task, in which they indicated the time intervals as perceived. The PA-induced rightward aftereffect resulted in an overestimation of time intervals whereas the leftward aftereffect resulted in an underestimation of time intervals. Their imaging results reveal that the left anterior insula and left superior frontal gyrus showed increased activity *after* versus *before* PA. They hence suggest that these regions are involved in spatial manipulation of the representation of time. Connecting those results with the ones reported here, we propose that the insula recruitment for aspectual verbs is likely to reflect a more general kind of structural configuration, more specifically the precedence relation on the axis along some dimension, including the temporal dimension.

For Event 2 (as for Event 1) the premotor area or the supplementary motor area (BA6) was recruited preferentially for AspectualV (light-blue circle in Fig. 3). This area is reported to be involved in action planning or event sequencing (e.g. Crozier 1999), action simulation, the generation of ordinally structured sequences (Stadler et al. 2011), and the updating of spatial information (Tanaka et al. 2005).

16During PA, participants are asked to wear prismatic lenses, which shift their visual field toward one side of space, and to point at visual targets. Due to the prismatic lenses, the visual targets are shifted relative to their actual locations as perceived. The participants have to adjust to the visual twist so as to point to the visual targets precisely.

We propose that the BA6 activation associated with the AspectualV condition reflects the sequential action planning along the eventive dimension.

Finally, we take the activity in the visual cortex (purple in Fig. 3) to reflect components not specifically relevant to the linguistic mechanisms in question, but mechanisms connected to attention, generalized task difficulty (Chen et al. 2008; Tan et al. 2001), or written word recognition (see review in Price, 2012). We leave it for future research to further clarify the connection between those presumed general processes and the specific meaning composition mechanisms discussed here.

Our fMRI results replicate Piñango et al. (2001) and Husband et al.'s (2011) findings. Whereas Piñango et al. (2001) report that Wernicke's aphasics (with damage to the left posterior superior temporo-parietal cortex) have difficulty comprehending sentences involving complement coercion, Husband et al. (2011) show that BA45 in LIF cortex (Broca's area) is preferentially involved in the implementation of sentences demanding complement coercion (that is, to the extent that a large portion of their stimuli sentences used aspectual verbs). Given their corresponding experimental designs, it was not possible in those studies to elucidate *when* during the course of comprehension, these respective cortical regions were maximally recruited. Experiment 2 presented here resolves this question by showing that Wernicke's area is preferentially recruited during the unfolding of the subject + aspectual verb composition whereas LIF cortex is preferentially recruited later in the comprehension process, once the complement head (indicating the presence of a structured individual) is retrieved. And again, this multiplicity of regions finds coherence in the Structured Individual hypothesis while it is left unexplained in the type-shifting approach, which by definition requires the activation to be localized to one cortical region.

Regarding the psychological verb conditions, as we have seen, the fMRI results show a "split" behavior such that for Event 1, only EnjoyingV shows a difference in preferential recruitment with respect to AspectualV; and for Event 2, only *LovingV* shows a difference in preferential recruitment with respect to AspectualV. We believe that this difference in behavior is rooted in independent but potentially interacting factors which the present results can only begin to tease apart. So, what we offer here is a conjecture whose examination we leave for future work.

As mentioned in the Introduction section, we do not predict a linguistic difference between the EnjoyingV and LovingV conditions. Consistent with previous proposals, verbs in both conditions are all equally expected to select for a target of emotion (Pesetsky 1995: 55, 96; Levin 1993; Katsika et al. 2012), thus predicting unified psycholinguistic behavior, which the self-paced reading results reported here support.

Moreover, we note that it is only with respect to *composition with the complement* (Event 2) that our analysis predicts preferential recruitment for aspectual verbs above and beyond that for the two psychological verb conditions. With respect to *composition with the subject* (Event 1), our analysis *in principle* makes no such prediction. The reason for this is that like aspectual verbs, psychological verbs also select for both entity-denoting and event-denoting complements. It is possible that this complexity in lexical encoding gives rise to comparable degree of neurological recruitment in Wernicke's area during lexical retrieval of the verbs.

To the extent that we found a difference at Event 1 between the AspectualV and LovingV sets on one hand and the EnjoyingV set on the other hand (AspectualV = LovingV > EnjoyingV), we look for the cause in the interpretive biases of this latter subset of psychological verbs. Indeed, what unites the verbs in the EnjoyingV set is that even though they may select for entity-denoting complements, the complement is preferentially interpreted eventively i.e. the preferential interpretation of *enjoy the book* is as *enjoy reading/writing the book.*17 This contrasts with the LovingV set in that these verbs allow for such a paraphrase, but not necessarily preferentially. So, *love the book*, can be understood as *love reading the book*, but does not have to be; it can also be understood as *love the story in the book* (state). If this eventive bias in interpretation for EnjoyingV were to impact lexical retrieval (by allowing the event-denoting possibility to be considered first by the processor), it could make the EnjoyingV set less ambiguous and therefore less taxing on Wernicke's area than the LovingV set. This could, in turn, result in a greater difference between AspectualV and EnjoyingV over AspectualV and LovingV at Event 1.

Finally, regarding Event 2, our hypothesis predicts AspectualV > {EnjoyingV = LovingV}, a prediction that holds only for LovingV. In line with our conjecture, we observe that EnjoyingV condition, constructed with an event-selecting bias, would be tapping a similar conceptual representation as the AspectualV set, which disambiguates along the eventive dimension.18 Both conditions, AspectualV and EnjoyingV, would then recruit possibly overlapping cortical regions. Importantly, this would take place during Event 2, the segment when the decision in favor of the eventive dimension would have been made—a reading that, crucially, is not equally salient in the LovingV condition.

All this said, what is most important for our analysis is that the traditional coercion verb set shows a split in neurological recruitment of Wernicke's area (AspectualV > EnjoyingV) at Event 1. And this split is consistent with the linguistic distinction proposed here.

17A closer look at their distribution of the specific experimental V + Complement in COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) shows that the LovingV set appears with greater frequency for the entity-denoting complements used in the stimuli than the EnjoyingV set (LovingV: 41; EnjoyingV: 7).

18Recall that the eventive dimension in the agentive interpretation is a salient dimension that was tapped in the AspectualV condition.

# **6 Conclusion**

This study represents an implementation of the Structured Individual analysis, working out its psychological and neurological viability in the form of the Structured Individual hypothesis; a hypothesis that captures a psycho- and neurolinguistic distinction between aspectual verbs and psychological verbs in a linguistically principled manner, and invokes independently motivated processing mechanisms to capture their behavior. Our findings suggest that the complement coercion effect is better understood as involving the real-time composition of aspectual verbs rather than involving a special semantic operation such as type-shifting. In this way, this kind of hypothesis represents a manifestation of an approach to meaning composition which connects functional application to concept composition through lexicalization, all along grounded in fundamental principles of conceptual structure.

**Acknowledgements** Research was funded by NSF-BCS grant BCS-0643266 to Maria Mercedes Piñango, and NSF-INSPIRE Grant CCF-1248100 to Maria Mercedes Piñango, Ashwini Deo, Todd Constable, and Mokshay Madiman. We thank Edgar Zurif, Ray Jackendoff, James Pustejovsky for very useful feedback, and audiences at Tsing Hua National University, Chung Cheng University (Taiwan 2013), the CUNY conference on Sentence Processing 2014, and the Annual Cognitive Science Meeting 2014. All errors remain our own.

# **References**

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# **Conceptual Combination, Property Inclusion, and the Aristotelian-Thomistic View of Concepts**

**Christina L. Gagné, Thomas L. Spalding and Matthew Kostelecky**

**Abstract** Understanding how properties are extended to combined concepts is critical to theories of concepts. In human judgments, properties true of a noun (ducks have webbed feet) become less true when that noun is modified (baby ducks have webbed feet), while properties false of a noun (candles have teeth) become less false when that noun is modified (purple candles have teeth). These modification and inverse modification effects have been shown to be extremely robust. Gagné and Spalding (2011, 2014b; Spalding and Gagné 2015) have argued that these effects are driven by expectation of contrast. The current experiment shows that, as expected, the modification and inverse modification effects are unaffected by the normative force with which a property is predicated of the head noun, supporting the expected contrast explanation. The results are discussed with respect to an Aristotelian-Thomistic approach to concepts (Spalding and Gagné 2013).

## **1 Overview**

The human conceptual and language systems are compositional and highly productive. One important mechanism underlying this compositional and productive character is nominal compounding. Nominal compounding involves the combination of two or more free morphemes to form a noun. This process can lead to the construction of new concepts in the conceptual system and new words in the mental lexicon. Consequently, the process provides insight into both word formation and conceptual combination. Combined concepts are typically expressed as either

C.L. Gagné (✉) ⋅ T.L. Spalding

Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
T.L. Spalding e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
M. Kostelecky Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2017 J.A. Hampton and Y. Winter (eds.), *Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology*, Language, Cognition, and Mind 3, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45977-6\_9

modifier-noun phrases (e.g., *mountain magazine*) or compound words (e.g., *snowball*) and these linguistic expressions are among the most basic examples of linguistic productivity in that they consist of the combination of two morphological constituents. In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of some psycholinguistic and cognitive research that identifies factors that influence the processing of compound words and modifier-noun phrases (which are generally either noun-noun or adjective-noun constructions). We then turn to the question of how the meanings of these linguistic expressions are elaborated, and present recent research on property verification. We discuss implications of these results for human concepts research, and end by suggesting that a view of human cognition derived from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas could be helpful in understanding recent research on concepts.

## **2 Background**

Concepts can often be paraphrased by expressing an underlying implicit relation between the concepts (*flu virus* is a virus that causes flu). Previous research has found that relational information plays a central role in the processing of combined concepts (for an overview, see Gagné and Spalding 2014a). The interpretation of combined concepts involves selecting the appropriate relational structure, and factors associated with the use of the relations affect the processing of the combined concept (e.g., combined concepts that share a recently used relational structure and a constituent are processed more easily than those that use a different relational structure, and these effects are true of both novel and known combinations; see Gagné and Spalding 2014a). However, such relational interpretations provide only the gist (i.e., a paraphrase) of the combined concept's meaning (e.g., that a *dog house* is a house for dogs) and do not exhaust our knowledge of the combined concept. Where does the rest of the meaning come from? For example, imagine that someone hears, for the first time, the phrase *dog house* and that they know the meaning of *dog* and *house*. Now, suppose we ask this learner, do doghouses have doorknobs? There are several interesting points to note. First, the gist interpretation *house for a dog*, does not, in and of itself, give the answer to the question. Second, the gist is not unrelated or irrelevant to answering the question. The person might reason that because dogs do not have hands, a doorknob would not be likely. Clearly, though, this is an inference based on the gist, not something that is inherently true of the combination of the concepts *dog* and *house*. Third, to be more explicit, note that *dog* and *house* could also be combined to form a gist something like *house that has a dog*, and this type of doghouse would be highly likely to have doorknobs. The key point for the current chapter is that answering the question requires an inference about the specific combination (and gist).

Our primary research question concerns how people make judgments about whether or not particular properties are true for a given concept. In terms of empirical evidence, we will focus on property verification in combined concepts, which refers to how people determine whether a particular characteristic (e.g., "is heavy") is true of a modified concept (e.g., *clay machine*). In addressing this question, we apply an approach in which a relation-based interpretation of the combined concept (Gagné and Shoben 1997; Spalding et al. 2010), along with specific knowledge about the constituent concepts and meta-knowledge, is used in subsequent reasoning processes to infer the content of the combined concept (Gagné and Spalding 2011, 2014b; Spalding and Gagné 2015 ; see also Connolly et al. 2007).

We should note that this "relations and reasoning" approach contrasts with many theories of conceptual combination, which tend to assume that the interpretation of a combined concept is the construction of a set of properties true of the combined concept. These properties are assumed mostly to be drawn from the constituent concepts, with some drawn from experience with the combined concept itself (see, e.g., the selective modification model of Osherson and Smith 1981; Smith and Osherson 1984; Smith et al. 1988 or schema based models such as Murphy 1988, 1990; Wisniewski 1997 or prototype combination models such as Hampton 1987, 1991). In turn, these more feature-based notions of conceptual combination tend to assume a kind of implicit "container" metaphor of concepts (see, e.g., Laurence and Margolis 1999, for a discussion of the container metaphor). Such theories tend to assume that properties are contained in the concepts (or, alternatively, that the concept just is the set of properties, or that the concept is made of the properties), and that property verification is, therefore, a matter of somehow inspecting the concept to see if the property is there. A schema theory of concepts, for example, presents the concept as the structured set of properties (i.e., the schema itself is the concept, and the schema is made of the properties in a certain structured set of relationships to each other). Property verification then, is a matter of somehow seeing whether the property is a part of the schema. The relation and reasoning approach and the more feature-based approaches to conceptual combination therefore treat property verification quite differently. We should note that in this discussion of the various models, we have grouped schema-based and property-based theories together because both approaches assume that properties are parts of concepts (that is, they both use a container metaphor of concepts). However, these two approaches differ in other aspects; for example, property-based theories were derived from propositional logic and schema-based theories were derived from predicate calculus (see Barsalou and Hale 1993). These differences, although important, are not relevant for the purposes of our current investigation.

Recently, a series of research projects have aimed at understanding property verification in combined concepts in order to evaluate competing theories of conceptual combination (Connolly et al. 2007; Gagné and Spalding 2011, 2014b; Jönsson and Hampton 2008, 2012; Hampton et al. 2011; Spalding and Gagné 2015). The most important result of these studies has been the modification effect: modification leads properties that are true of the head noun of the modifier-noun phrase to be less true of the modified concept (e.g., *baby ducks have webbed feet* is judged less true than *ducks have webbed feet*) while properties clearly false of the head are judged less false of the modified concept (e.g., *purple candles have teeth* is less false than *candles have teeth*), despite the fact that the properties were explicitly chosen to be unrelated to the modifier that was used. Indeed, the same effects arise even when the modifier is a non-word (e.g., *chonk ducks have webbed feet*), and therefore cannot provide any conceptual content to act as the basis for the property verification judgment (e.g., Gagné and Spalding 2014b). Furthermore, the modification effect seems to be very robust over levels of typicality of properties of the head. That is, while features highly typical of the head are generally judged more true of the modified concept than features that are not highly typical of the head, typicality of the property for the head does not seem to provide much resistance to the modification effect. Even very highly typical properties of the head (e.g., the property *edible* for the concept *lamb*) show the modification effect (e.g., Hampton et al. 2011; Spalding and Gagné 2015). Finally, we should note that the modification effect appears to be quite robust over specific verification tasks, including ratings of likelihood of the truth of a property for a category, true/false decisions about the property's relation to the concept and the response times to make those decisions, and estimates of the percentages of category members for which the property is true.

(Gagné and Spalding 2011, 2014b; see also Spalding and Gagné 2015) argue that the modification effect is largely due to participants' expectation that subcategories will be both similar to and dissimilar from their categories, and that this suggests that property verification is more a result of reasoning than of inspecting the contents of the combined concept. Furthermore, they argue that the modification effect strongly suggests that properties are not transferred from constituents to the combined concept, but that instead the properties are predicated about the combined concept as a result of the reasoning that results from the demand for property verification.

Thus, we suggest that the processing of a combined concept initially involves constructing a structural description that denotes the way in which the two constituents are connected and determines the linguistic (morphological) structure in which the lexical representations of the constituents are mapped onto particular morphosyntactic roles. This assumption follows from linguistic theories that also propose a structure-based approach (e.g., Allen 1980; Levi 1978; Libben 1993). Thus, the phrase *cherry pie* begins as a modifier-head structure in which the *cherry* is mapped onto the modifier role and *pie* is mapped onto the head role. This linguistic information is involved in constructing a relation-based structure for the corresponding combined concept. The phrase *cherry pie* corresponds to *pie made with cherries.* Properties can then be inferred for this structure. This aspect of our proposal is consistent with previous data indicating that relational structures were available prior to properties. For example, Eliaser (1994) found that relation-based interpretations (e.g., whale boat = boat for hunting whales) were faster than property-based interpretations (e.g., whale boat = a big boat). Similarly, Gagné (2000) demonstrated that it took longer to judge that a property definition was acceptable than to judge that a relational definition was acceptable.

When inferring properties, participants use the meta-knowledge that XY's are a type of Y (see Bauer 1983) to determine that properties that are true of Y (i.e., of the category) are likely to be true of the subcategory, unless there is specific information that would suggest otherwise. However, participants also draw on meta-knowledge that subcategories are different in some way from the category. Indeed, the purpose of using a combined concept rather than just the category is usually to refer to a subcategory that is distinct from other members of the category (e.g., Clark and Berman 1987; Downing 1977). This accounts for why previous research (e.g., Connolly et al.2007, 2011; Gagné and Spalding2014b; Hampton et al. 2011) has found that a property (e.g., has webbed feet) that is true of an unmodified concept (e.g., *duck*) also is seen as being true of a modified concept (e.g., *baby duck*) but less so. This explanation readily accounts for why a property (e.g., has teeth) that is false of an unmodified concept (e.g., *candle*) is judged as being more true of a modified concept (e.g., *purple candle*), as reported in a series of experiments reported by (Spalding and Gagné 2015). Both results (for the true and the false properties) can be explained by participants reasoning that the subcategory is distinct in some way from the category. Interestingly, the reasoning process appears to be more heavily dependent on meta-cognition and on pragmatic factors than on the specific content of the concepts involved. Consequently, content-free modifiers (i.e., unknown words) also produced a modification effect even though they had no content that could be used to assess specific similarity or dissimilarity with the category. Finally, Spalding and Gagné (2015) argue that if property verification for combined concepts involves such predication following reasoning and judgment, it is possible that such processes are also involved in all property judgments for single concepts, not just combined concepts. This, in turn, suggests a very different, more Aristotelian-Thomistic, approach to the relation between property and concept, rather than the kind of implicit "container" metaphor that is so common in current theories of concepts. In particular, in the A-T approach, concepts are not "made of" properties and they do not "contain" properties, and so one does not verify properties by "looking inside" the concept. We return to this point in the Discussion.

## **3 Current Experiment**

In the current experiment, we investigate whether the modification effect is sensitive to the way in which a test property is initially predicated of the head. Spalding and Gagné (2015) used a procedure in which the likelihood of an unknown property was manipulated for a particular head concept, and participants were then asked what percentage of the head concept's category members had the property or they were asked what percentage of the members of the modified concept had the property. For example, the participants might be told, "Almost all birds have sesamoid bones. What percent of birds/baby birds have sesamoid bones?" Using this procedure, Spalding and Gagné found robust modification effects: The percentage estimates for properties presented as true of almost all category members were higher for the unmodified than for the modified concepts. Spalding and Gagné also found a robust inverse modification effect: When the property was presented as true of almost no member of the category, the percentage estimate was lower for the unmodified than the modified concept. Spalding and Gagné's manipulation was about the likelihood of the property for the unmodified head. However, it is unclear whether properties predicated in ways that are more normative, rather than just about the likelihood of the property, would show the same modification effect (Prasada and Dillingham 2009, for example, have shown that simple statistical likelihood does not account for all aspects of the relation of properties to concepts).

In particular, we were interested in whether properties predicated with varying degrees of normative force would show variation in the size of the modification effect. Investigating this point will allow us to determine the extent to which the inclusion of properties is affected by general meta-knowledge about the parent category (e.g., about the category *bird* when reasoning about a subcategory of birds). We chose three ways of predicating the properties. In the Bare Generic condition, the test property was predicated generically with no modification: *birds have property X*. In the Normative condition, the test property was predicated in a normative way: *normal birds have property X*. In the Typical condition, the test property was predicated in a less normative, but frequentist way: *typical birds have property X*. Thus, the Bare Generic condition should have the most normative force, and should thus result in the highest percentage estimates. The Normative condition relaxes the implied "every" from the generic condition, but maintains some degree of normative force, implying that a bird lacking property X might be abnormal. Thus, one might expect that properties predicated in this condition would have lower percentage estimates than those predicated in the Bare Generic condition. The Typical condition further relaxes the force of the predication, such that a bird lacking property X might be atypical, but not abnormal. Thus, one might expect that the properties here would have the lowest percentage estimates of all the predication conditions. The same kinds of predictions could be made for false features (birds do not have property X, normal birds do not have property X, typical birds do not have property X), but with the reversed order (i.e., properties presented as generically false would have the lowest percentage estimation, then those presented as normative, then typical). In other words, the nature of the predication could be seen as directly affecting the strength of the property for the head concept, but without depending on the participants' specific conceptual knowledge.

The critical interest for the current project, however, is whether this manipulation might affect the modification effect itself. One might make predictions for the size of the modification effect that parallel the predictions for the level of verification. That is, one might think that there should be little or no modification effect for the Bare Generic predication, a somewhat larger modification effect for the Normative condition, and the largest modification effect in the Typical condition. Again, similar, but reversed effects might be predicted for the false properties, across the predication conditions. On the other hand, given the previous work showing, for example, that even categorical properties (e.g., *lambs are mammals*; Hampton et al. 2011) show a robust modification effect, and in which the major factor affecting the modification effect was the expectation of contrast between the category and the subcategory rather than the specific content of the categories (e.g., Spalding and Gagné 2015), one might expect robust and equivalent modification effects across all three predication conditions.

# *3.1 Method*

**Materials and design**. 84 head nouns were drawn from Gagné and Spalding (2011). Unmodified (*bottles*) and modified nouns (*safety bottles*) were constructed. An unknown predicate (i.e., a potential property of the head which the participant was not expected to know) was associated with each noun. Three levels of normative force were chosen to manipulate the type of predication for the unmodified noun: Bare Generic (e.g., *bottles are cooled in annealing ovens*), Normative (e.g., *normal bottles are cooled in annealing ovens*), Typical (e.g., *typical bottles are cooled in annealing ovens*). A second set of each type of predication was created to present the same unknown property as false of the unmodified noun (e.g., *bottles are not cooled in annealing ovens*; *normal bottles are not cooled in annealing ovens*; *typical bottles are not cooled in annealing ovens*).

The test items were questions asking what percentage of the modified or unmodified nouns had the property (e.g., What percentage of bottles/safety bottles are cooled in annealing ovens?). Predication type was crossed with Property (True/False) and Modification (Unmodified/Modified) to create a 3 × 2 × 2 design.

Participants responded using a scale with a slider that moved from 0 to 100%. These percentage estimates were the dependent variable in the experiment. The materials were counterbalanced such that each level of predication was tested equally often with each modified and unmodified noun. Each participant saw each head noun on only one trial during the experiment. Thus, each person saw 84 trials.

**Participants**. One hundred forty-four first-year psychology students participated for partial course credit. All were native English-speakers.

**Procedure**. The instructions included information about the unknown predicates: "The goal of this research is to understand the conceptual system. In everyday life, we are frequently called upon to make judgments of the likelihood of something being true on the basis of limited information. Consider the following situation: If you were told that mammals require biotin for hemoglobin synthesis, how likely do you think it would be that dogs require biotin for hemoglobin synthesis? Because some concepts are described by one word (e.g., dogs), whereas other concepts are described by phrases (e.g., hunting dogs), in this study you will be asked to make judgments involving both types of concepts."

On each trial, the participants were given a statement in which an unknown predicate was presented with an unmodified noun and participants were told to assume that the statement was definitely true. They were then asked what percentage of either the unmodified or modified noun would have the property (e.g., What percentage of bottles/safety bottles are cooled in an annealing oven?).

# *3.2 Results*

The descriptive statistics for the percentage estimates are presented in Table 1. The data were analyzed using Linear Mixed Effects models, as these allow participants and items to be simultaneously treated as random effects (thus avoiding the "language as fixed effect fallacy", Clark 1973), among other advantages (for discussion, see e.g., Pinheiro and Bates 2000; Quené and van den Bergh 2004, 2008). Predication condition (Bare Generic, Normative, Typical), Property (True, False), and Modification (Unmodified, Modified) were entered as fixed factors. Interactions involving Predication were tested using Chi-square tests of model fits, while other effects involving only factor comparisons with two values are reported as z-scores, based on the slopes of the predictors in the models. The analyses were conducted using the *mixed* function in Stata 13.

Most critically, there is no three-way interaction among Predication, Property, and Modification, *Chi2* (2) = 3.11, *p* = 0.21. Thus, there is no evidence that the modification effect differs across the levels of Predication and Property.

Because the modification effect is (as predicted) in opposite directions for the true and false properties, it is easiest to understand the data by separating the data on this factor. When considering only the true properties, there is no interaction between Predication and Modification, *Chi2* (2) = 1.99, *p* = 0.37, but there are strong effects of both Modification (*z* = −5.27, *p* < 0.001) and Predication, with the Bare Generic condition differing from both the Normative (*z* = −11.0, *p* < 0.001) and the Typical (*z* = −11.1, *p* < 0.001) conditions. There is no evidence that the modification effect is sensitive to Predication type.

When considering only the false properties, there is again no interaction between Predication and Modification, *Chi2* (2) = 1.75, *p* = 0.42, but there are strong effects of both Modification (*z* = 3.08, *p* < 0.002) and Predication, with the Bare Generic condition differing from both the Normative (*z* = 12.0, *p* < 0.001) and the Typical (*z* = 13.0, *p* < 0.001) conditions. As was the case for the true properties, there is no evidence that the modification effect is sensitive to Predication type.

Finally, it is perhaps important to note specifically that there are robust modification effects in the Bare Generic condition, for both true (*z* = −6.49, *p* < 0.001) and false (*z* = 4.44, *p* < 0.001) properties. Thus, although the Bare Generic condition has numerically slightly smaller modification effects, there is no statistical evidence that those effects differ from the modification effects in either the Normative or Typical condition, and there is evidence for a very robust modification effect, even in the Bare Generic condition.

## **4 Discussion**

The results indicate that the type of predication does matter for property verification, with the Bare Generic form of predication having the highest percentage estimates for the true properties and the lowest for the false properties. This suggests that participants were treating these statements as being the most canonical in that the statements were conveying information that most members of that category share. Indeed, the Bare Generic condition percentage estimates in the current experiment are very similar to those obtained by (Spalding and Gagné 2015, Experiment 2) when they told participants that "almost all" members of the head noun category had the property and then asked participants to estimate percentages. The task used in Spalding and Gagné was identical to the one in the current experiment, except that the likelihood of the property being true of the category was manipulated by using Almost all, Some, and Almost No, suggesting that the Bare Generic predication encourages a reading that is similar to "almost all", at least in the context of the other predication types. However, the Normative and Typical types of predication did not differ from each other, for either true or false properties. This suggests that participants were treating both the "normal" and "typical" statements as linguistic hedges, rather than as applying differing normative force (as was the case for the Bare Generic form). Indeed, it might be the case that these conditions simply reminded the participants that there are many abnormal and atypical members of most categories, thus lowering the overall likelihood of the property. Thus, it appears that information provided by the type of predication (Bare Generic, Normative, and Typical) is used to provide a starting point for what percentage of category members are expected to have a given property.

Although the type of predication affected the percentage estimates strongly, it had no impact on the modification effect itself (as indicated by the lack of interaction). Thus, as with high levels of typicality or centrality (Hampton et al. 2011; Spalding and Gagné 2015), presenting the property as generically true (or false) of the unmodified head does not provide any resistance to the modification effect, relative to presenting it as normally or typically true (or false). For example, in Hampton et al. (2011), the modification effect was the same for statements with mutable properties (e.g., lambs are white versus baby lambs are white) and immutable (or central) properties (e.g., lambs are warm blooded versus baby lambs are warm blooded). Interestingly, in the current data, despite the fact that the normative and typical framings of the predications resulted in much lower (higher for false properties) percentage estimates, this did not seem to make those conditions any more susceptible to the modification effect than the bare generic condition, as one might expect if those conditions simply made the participants think that the categories were more variable with respect to those properties. This result (as well as the lack of interaction in terms of mutable versus immutable properties observed in previous studies) is consistent with the view that the modification effect is primarily due to participants' expectations of partial contrast between categories and subcategories (Gagné and Spalding 2011, 2014b; Spalding and Gagné 2015). That is, because those true properties are still estimated at about 85% for the unmodified head (and false properties at about 15%), they drive an expectation of contrast when the noun is modified, but no more nor less of an expectation of contrast than the bare generic condition. To further illustrate, it appears that inferential processing is drawing more heavily on meta-knowledge about the function of modification rather than on content-specific knowledge about the particular properties and concepts, and consequently, for true properties, participants reduce the estimate for modified concepts relative to unmodified concepts due to the expectation that subcategories differ in some way from categories. An estimate about any statement that has the form XY has property P is reduced (for true properties) or increased (for false properties) relative to statements of the form Y has property P. As discussed in the previous paragraph, the starting estimate (i.e., the estimate for the unmodified concept) can differ depending on the form of the prediction, but the size of the increase or reduction is independent of this starting estimate.

To give a concrete example, when participants are told that *bottles are cooled in annealing ovens,* they assume that most members of the *bottle* category have that property. They draw on this information and the meta-knowledge that an XY tends to have the same properties as a Y when estimating what percentage of *safety bottles* have that property to initially consider a relatively high percentage. This estimate is then lowered because participants also use the meta-knowledge that subcategory members are distinct, in some way, from the category. Interestingly, even though there is nothing inherent in the content of the modifier to conflict with that property (just as there is nothing in the content of *baby* that would prevent a *baby lamb* from being warm-blooded), the bias towards viewing categories and subcategories as partially contrastive led to the lowering of the estimate of a property that was previously said to be true of the category. The application of this same bias explains why participants *increase* the estimate for a property that is said to be false of the category; the property that is not true of most members of the category is seen as the basis of the difference between the subcategory and category and, thus, subcategory members are thought to be more likely to hold this property.

One might expect, on this view, that there should be an interaction of modification with predication type, such that the modification effect would be larger as the likelihood of the property for the head goes down (Hampton, personal communication). That is, in the limiting case, if 100% of the category has the property, then 100% of the subcategory should have it, and as one moves away from the 100% mark for the category as a whole, then there is more "room" for the subcategory to contrast with the category (while allowing the percentages to still work out from a mathematical perspective). Two considerations argue against this, however. First, it is highly unlikely that the participants are calibrating their estimates this finely; instead they seem to simply apply a more or less equivalent level of adjustment of likelihood in all cases. Also, of course, it is known that people are not particularly good about making sure that probabilities or percentages "add up" properly (see, e.g., Jönsson and Hampton 2006). Second, even if they were calibrating their estimates this finely, there is another effect that would seem to be a countervailing force: (Spalding and Gagné 2015) found that when the property was not true enough of the head category, then there was no modification effect. In short, the expectation of contrast depends on there being an initial expectation that the property either is or is not true of the unmodified concept. When participants were told that some X's have property P, there was no modification effect (nor was there an inverse modification effect). Generally, of course, the existence of both the modification effect and its inverse assumes that at some level of likelihood, there is a reversal of contrast expectation, and hence there are probably some levels of likelihood where there is no effect. In other words, as likelihood of a property decreases towards 50% or so, the modification effect goes away, and then re-emerges as an inverse modification effect as the likelihood of the property moves further toward 0%. Thus, even if participants were trying diligently to make their percentages add up properly, we should be unlikely to see the kind of interaction suggested above, as this change to expected contrast works in opposition to the interaction described in the earlier part of this paragraph.

## *4.1 The Aristotelian-Thomistic Approach*

As suggested by Gagné and Spalding (2011,2014b) and Spalding and Gagné (2015), the effect of expected contrast on the modification effect suggests a very different kind of property verification process than that envisaged in other research on this topic (Connolly et al. 2007; Jönsson and Hampton 2008, 2012; Hampton et al. 2011). In particular, the results suggest that conceptual combination does not consist of the merging and evaluation of properties of the constituent concepts as the mechanism for creating new concepts. That is, the creation of the concept *farm dog* does not appear to consist of accessing properties of *farm* and of *dog* and then building the concept *farm dog* from these properties. If this were the case, then it is difficult to explain the pattern of results observed in the current experiment and in previously published work on the same topic (such as Spalding and Gagné 2015, which also reports an inverse modification effect for false properties, such as *(purple) candles have teeth*). In particular, it is more difficult to understand why properties that were explicitly said to be not true of the category would be added to the subcategory. Furthermore, it strongly suggests that the process of conceptual combination is not a process of mechanically transferring properties from constituent concepts to the newly combined concept, but instead reflects reasoning at the point of decision (for other arguments against such a property transference mechanism, see Connolly et al. 2007; Fodor 1994, 1998, 2001; Fodor and Lepore 1993, 1996). Indeed, these results are difficult to explain using feature-based theories of conceptual combination. This is particularly true for the false properties, which would have no reason to arise in the combined concept's representation under any of the theories of conceptual combination. The modification effect also suggests that property verification is not a matter of looking into the concept to see if the property is there. Now, as Spalding and Gagné point out, if one does not do property verification by inspecting the contents of the combined concept, perhaps one also does not make property decisions about any concept by inspecting the contents of the concept. How, then, does one make such decisions?

We believe that the current results, and the previous results of research on the modification effect, point to the need for an alternative framework, based on the incorporation of reasoning processes and meta-knowledge about the role of modification in human communication, that could be used in forming and testing psychological theories of concepts and conceptual combination, and in particular theories of the relationship between properties and concepts. Surprisingly, there is relatively little modern research specifically into the relationship between properties and concepts (see, e.g., Laurence and Margolis 1999). Historically, however, the relation between properties and concepts has been investigated in great detail in philosophy, particularly in the work of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. (Spalding and Gagné 2013) have argued that the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) view of concepts might have much to tell us about concepts (see also Spalding and Gagné 2015). They showed that the A-T view is not the same as the modern "classical" view, which was (correctly) ruled out by concepts research in the 1970s and 1980s, and discussed several aspects of modern concepts research that fit surprisingly well with the A-T understanding of concepts. Therefore, we end this chapter with a description of properties and concepts in the A-T view, and the suggestion that taking this philosophical view of concepts seriously could have real benefits for research in the psychology of concepts, and particularly for our understanding of the relationship between properties and concepts.

To begin, it is important to realize that thinkers in the A-T tradition have thought deeply about properties and concepts and about how one reasons about things in the world, and have made many distinctions at levels of granularity that are far finer than those in modern concepts research. Also, it should be noted that making judgments about properties is not limited, in the A-T view, to philosophy of concepts, but also explicitly involves the philosophical domains of logic and reasoning. The discussion here is necessarily brief and introductory, but there is much serious discussion of A-T thinking on properties (see, e.g., Reynolds 2001; Wippel 2000, Part 2), concepts (for an overview, see, e.g., Mercier 1950a) and in the related judgments people make (see, e.g., Mercier 1950b). Indeed, some of the terminology in common modern use is taken from this tradition, though having lost much of its technical meaning in the transition. *Property* is perhaps the most obvious case. *Property* in modern usage is a part of the concept, and as such is a representation of any characteristic believed to be associated with members of the category denoted by the concept. *Property* in the A-T tradition is quite different. First, *property* is a shorthand for *proper accident*, and a proper accident always inheres in things in the world, not in concepts. *Accidents* contrast with *substances*. Substances, to a first approximation, are things that exist in themselves, while accidents are things that exist in or 'inhere in' substances. Thus, neither substances nor accidents (including proper accidents) primarily exist in representations because accidents inhere in substances and substances are found in the real world. Furthermore, proper accidents contrast with other kinds of accidents, in that proper accidents "flow from" the essence of the substance in which they inhere, while other kinds of accidents do not flow from the essence of the substance. For example, having two eyes flows from the essence of being human, but having brown hair does not. Note that being necessary, in this sense, does not mean that every existing human must have two eyes, or that a human who loses an eye becomes non-human, but rather that it is in the nature of the human to have two eyes, and that a failure to have two eyes is a deprivation of the normal property flowing from the essence. Such deprivations are well-known and well-explained by the A-T view (see Spalding and Gagné 2013, for more discussion and comparison to the so-called classical view of concepts). Thus, properties, in the A-T view, are not parts of concepts. Instead, they are characteristics of things in the world, though one may have a concept of a given property, of course. Properties can be predicated of primary substances (e.g., *wings* can be predicated of individual birds in the world), or of secondary substances (i.e., *wings* might also be predicated of a universal such as *birds*). Also, such predications can be remembered and become habitual, because we have understood how *wings* and *birds* relate. Hence, one need not consciously think through the relationship of *wings* and *birds* anew every time. Importantly, though, it is the act of predicating *wings* of *birds* that becomes habitual. Thus, it is not the case that *wings* must become part of the concept *bird*, even when the predication happens habitually (i.e., in the A-T view, it is not necessary to turn to a conceptual container approach to account for the predication).

A second important characteristic of A-T thinking about concepts and properties is that, unlike most thinking about concepts since at least Locke, the concept is not the thing that the mind considers when it thinks about something. Rather, the thing is what the mind considers, while the concept is simply what allows the mind to think about the thing. One thinks about the external object via the concept, rather than thinking terminating in or being directed toward the concept itself. Of course, the mind can reflexively think about a concept—I can consider my own concept of *bird* and reflect upon what it is to have a concept at all, but that is not what I do when I think about birds; note that this distinction is rather hard to keep clear under a Lockean approach, where to think about birds just is to activate the concept *bird*, and thinking about the concept *bird* is also to activate the concept *bird*. Relatedly, thinking, in the A-T tradition, is sometimes said to involve representations, but this is not quite correct, in modern terms. Instead, thinking in the A-T tradition involves *re*-*presentations* of the thing to the mind, of the mind *re*-*presenting* the thing internally. Thus, *re*-*presentation* (in the verb sense) is primary in the A-T view, whereas a *representation* (in the noun sense) is primary in modern theories. In the A-T view, representation of a thing is an event, an action undertaken by a cognizer through which a thing is known, not typically a thing known in itself. Although this distinction may seem picayune, it is important to note that the early modern (and continuing) difficulties with radical skepticism and the "problem of the bridge" derive from the claim that the ideas are what the mind grasps—If the mind grasps ideas, how do we bridge from the ideas to the world? What becomes a fundamental problem for many modern accounts of knowledge is simply not an issue on the A-T view of knowledge, since in this account the mind grasps the thing through the concept (or, stated differently, the thing is re-presented through the concept) rather than grasping the concept itself. For Aristotle and, especially, Thomas Aquinas, the mind mirrors or re-presents the external world in a basically reliable way (Feser 2009, pp. 145–149, provides a clear discussion of this point; for a more detailed treatment, see Perler 2001).

A third important characteristic of the A-T view of concepts and properties is that all thinking involves the use of sensory information. In the A-T view, any judgment about a thing, for example, involves not only the concept of the thing, but the *phantasm*, the sensory information associated with the actual things that the concept is "of". There is, following a famous dictum of Aristotle, no thinking without a phantasm. This necessary involvement of the phantasm is important because it means that there is a constant, fundamental, and completely thoroughgoing recourse to the senses for any thought whatsoever. The A-T view has a long history of carefully considering how exactly sensory and intellectual information relate and interact in thinking. This history could be very helpful in understanding some of the recent work on embodied concepts and perceptual symbol systems (e.g., Barsalou 1999). Indeed, notions such as the re-enactment of conceptual content via simulation (e.g., Barsalou 2009, p. 1282) accord extremely well with the A-T notion of re-presentation (verb) as opposed to representation (noun). Similarly, the way that (Wu and Barsalou 2009) describe the process of generating features from simulations is very similar to how the A-T view would describe the process of predicating properties via the phantasms (which are also multi-modal and sensory-based). Furthermore, the A-T approach incorporates the imagination, a power of manipulating phantasms, such that sensory information can be retrieved, manipulated, and re-combined in novel ways, as well as common sense (here a technical A-T term), which combines sensory information from multiple sensory modalities. Finally, conceptual thinking in the A-T view involves the intellect, which is the power called upon in formal reasoning, abstract concept formation, mathematics, and other such tasks, as well as a power that can direct the imagination and access the phantasms. Thus, when a person thinks about concepts and properties, all of these various powers come into play.

A fourth important characteristic of the A-T view is that properties (or features) are not more fundamental than substances. Rather, substances are more fundamental than properties, because we say or 'predicate' properties of substances and not the other way round. For example, we predicate 'rational' of 'Socrates' and not 'Socrates' of 'rational'. We would never claim that 'Rational is Socrates,' though the obverse clearly obtains, namely 'Socrates is rational.' The property (rationality) is predicated of the substance (Socrates). Moreover, we never predicate one substance of another. For instance, we cannot predicate Socrates of Plato in the following judgment: Plato is Socrates. Instead, we predicate various accidents of substances and these accidents or features are seen to inhere in the substance. This contrasts markedly from most modern views, in which concepts consist of properties. That is, the concept is made of or just is the set of properties. Thus, the properties are more basic than the concept, which has several interesting consequences. One is that if this general view were true, one would expect that categorization would be a matter of identifying the properties of a thing and then using those properties to determine whether this thing is in the category. Indeed, as a general description, this is basically how categorization is understood in most modern theories. However, this implies that the properties should be identified prior to the category. Thus, before one grasps that the thing they are looking at is a bird, they should already have grasped that they are seeing a beak and feathers and wings, etc. Note that it is not that they are seeing visual information that can be interpreted in these ways, but literally that they are grasping those conceptual features. A second implication of this approach is that there should be a clear and simple linkage from the extraction of simple visual features to simple conceptual features to the concept. In short, we should have no discontinuity between research on object recognition and research on concepts and categorization. Yet, research on object recognition rarely uses conceptual features, while research on concepts and categorization assumes conceptual features and rarely even posits the exact connection to the simple visual (or, for that matter, other sensory) features.

Finally, it is important to understand that the A-T view of concepts and properties is embedded within a very complicated and intricate understanding of not only the mind, but of the physical world. Thus, for example, the A-T way of thinking about essences, properties, and concepts derives not from what is convenient for philosophy of mind, but from prior metaphysical commitments about the physical world and how the mind is seen to function (fairly reliably) as a part of that world. That is to say, the A-T approach to accounting for physical change through terms like actuality/potentiality and form/matter serves as the basis for A-T cognitive theory, and this cognitive theory is, in turn, a further specification of those basic metaphysical commitments. An immediate and obvious benefit of this approach, say advocates of A-T cognitive theory, is that it is completely consistent across differing levels of cognitive and metaphysical explanation, from how intellectual concept formation occurs, to other sorts of cognition, to an explanation of the constitution of physical things (including humans), and even to the processes of change as such (e.g., Feser 2014) because it is all part of a general and consistent view of the world.

What is surprising about this is how well the philosophy of mind inherent in the A-T approach fits modern evidence about the mind. (Spalding and Gagné 2013), for example, discuss how the A-T approach fits well with a wide variety of evidence drawn from modern psychological research on concepts, including evidence for prototypes and exemplars, as well as work on generics and essentialism, the relation between human and non-human animals' abilities to deal with categories, and other recent research topics in concepts. We should also note here that (Prasada and Dillingham's 2009) notion of K-properties (i.e., properties that are indicative of a kind of thing) is explicitly Aristotelian, though they do not explicitly make use of the rest of the A-T approach to cognition. Pustejovsky (1995) incorporates a version of the four Aristotelian causes in his "qualia" structure for lexical items. Nor should we think of the A-T view as being relevant only to the study of concepts or language. Feser (2014) provides a broader discussion of the A-T approach as an appropriate underpinning for science in general, both in the sense that its view of human cognition provides a proper underpinning for the human activity of doing science and in the sense that its metaphysical commitments provide a proper underpinning for science considered as a set of propositions about the world. Indeed, the A-T view may well provide at least as good a philosophy of mind as we can find in modern and contemporary approaches (see e.g., Madden 2013; see also Spaldingetal. 2014). At the very least, the consistency between cognitive theory and metaphysical commitments in the A-T view presents a picture that contrasts sharply with modern psychology and philosophy of mind, where there seem to be extraordinarily deep and intractable problems in consistently linking down to metaphysics (Madden 2013, for example, discusses many problems with the relations between modern philosophy of mind and modern metaphysical approaches; see also Feser 2006, 2008, 2009).

## *4.2 Applying the A-T View to the Modification Effect*

The applicability of the A-T view to cognitive science is seen acutely in what we have been discussing throughout this article: property verification judgments and subsequent modifications made to those judgments. To show this applicability, it is perhaps best to begin with a general explanation of how a property verification judgment is made (in its strictest sense) on the A-T view (i.e., through what Aristotle and Aquinas call *episteme* or *scientia*, respectively), and then present how the same approach might account for the sort of property verification results encountered in our experiment.

On the A-T view, property verification in its strictest sense occurs in virtue of understanding how a given property is explanatorily useful in knowing the nature of the thing in which the property is found. In other words, in the A-T view, to do property verification is to verify that a characteristic is, in fact, a property of the thing (i.e., that it is a characteristic that flows from the essence of the thing). To put the matter concretely, we can ask, 'How does one decide whether birds have wings?' but with the understanding that we are actually asking how one decides whether *wings* is a proper accident (flowing from the essence) of *bird*. On the A-T view, property verification in this strict sense will occur when we understand why the property regularly occurs in the kind of thing of which we are predicating the property. Note that in the A-T view, much of what we "know" about the world, even though a reliable guide for action, etc., is not actually known in the strict sense of episteme or scientia. We return to this point below.