Abstract

This study was planned to investigate the roles of property's salience and dimensional relevance in the interpretation of compound nouns. In Experiment 1, I examined whether compound nouns including salient properties would be interpreted by property-mapping strategy regardless of the similarity between constituent nouns. Results showed that most of compound nouns were interpreted by property-mapping strategy in the high salient condition. However, subjects were apt to interpret compound nouns by thematic relation strategy as the similarity between constituent nouns decreased in the low salient condition. In Experiment 2, comparing head nouns including relevant dimensions with ones including irrelevant dimensions, I investigated the role of head nouns in the interpretation of compound nouns. In the highly relevant condition, almost compound nouns were interpreted by property-mapping strategy like experiment 1. In the low relevant condition, the number of compound nouns interpreted by thematic relation strategy increased remarkably but property-mapping strategy was still prevalent. In conclusion, people are inclined to interpreted compound nouns by property-mapping strategy on condition that modifier nouns include salient properties and head nouns have relevant dimensions to these properties.