A model is proposed to account for recent findings on the time needed to decide that a test instance is a member of a target semantic category. It is assumed that the meaning of a lexical term can be represented by semantic features. Some of these features are essential or defining aspects of a word's meaning (defining features), while others are more accidental or characteristic aspects (characteristic features). This defining versus characteristic distinction is combined with a two-stage processing mechanism in such a way that the first stage determines the similarity between the test instance and target category with respect to both defining and characteristic features, while the second stage considers only agreement between defining features. This model is shown to be consistent with most semantic memory effects, and two new experiments provide further detailed support for it.

To comprehend a nonpredicating combination involving a modifier (e.g., mountain) and a head noun (e.g., stream), one must specify a thematic relation (e.g., a stream in the mountains) that links the 2 constituent concepts. The authors investigated the influence of thematic relations on the comprehension of nonpredicating combinations. Experiments 1 and 3 demonstrated that people use information about what relations the constituents typically instantiate during conceptual combination. More specifically, a combination is easier to interpret when it uses a frequent relation of the modifier than when it uses a less frequent relation. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that these results are not an artifact of the individual component words. The authors propose a model of conceptual combination called the competition among relations in nominals (CARIN) model in which ease of comprehension depends both on the frequency of the to-be-selected relation and on the frequency of the alternatives.

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Three experiments were performed to test contrasting predictions of a dual-representation theory and a context availability model of concreteness effects in verbal processing. In one experiment, abstract and concrete sentences were presented with and without a paragraph context. Without context, subjects took longer to read abstract sentences than concrete sentences. With context, the reading times did not differ. A similar result was observed in a second experiment in which lexical decision times were measured for abstract and concrete words. In the absence of context, lexical decision times for abstract words were longer than for concrete words. With a sentence context, however, the lexical decision times for these two word types were equivalent. A subsequent rating experiment indicated that rated context availability was a good predictor of reaction time in both experiments. The results were discussed as providing support for the context availability model.Differences in the accessibility of the meaning of abstract and concrete verbal materials are extremely well documented.

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Three studies examined the ubiquity of the bowed serial position effect in comparative judgments: the tendency for pairs of extreme magnitude to be discriminated more readily than pairs of intermediate magnitude. Although prior research has demonstrated that this effect occurs quite regularly in finite set experiments that repeatedly present a small number of items, there has been some ambiguity about the robustness of the bowed serial position effect in infinite set experiments, in which items are never repeated. Based on the extensive norms collected in Experiment 1, Experiment 2 demonstrated that a bowed serial position effect does in fact occur in a large infinite set experiment. The results of Experiment 3 indicate that this bowed serial position effect is not an artifact of our norms. The results are consistent with models that emphasize categorization of magnitudes and inconsistent with models that emphasize positional discriminability.