Elsevier

Brain and Language

Volume 169, June 2017, Pages 8-21
Brain and Language

Relational vs. attributive interpretation of nominal compounds differentially engages angular gyrus and anterior temporal lobe

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2017.01.008Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We compare conceptual combination of relational and attributive nominal compounds.

  • BOLD response magnitude in angular gyrus (AG) was greater to relational combination.

  • Right AG showed greater positive task-responsive activity for relational compounds.

  • Left AG showed greater negative task-responsive activity for relational compounds.

  • Anterior temporal lobe BOLD time-to-peak was earlier for attributive compounds.

Abstract

The angular gyrus (AG) and anterior temporal lobe (ATL) have been found to respond to a number of tasks involving combinatorial processing. In this study, we investigate the conceptual combination of nominal compounds, and ask whether ATL/AG activity is modulated by the type of combinatorial operation applied to a nominal compound. We compare relational and attributive interpretations of nominal compounds and find that ATL and AG both discriminate these two types, but in distinct ways. While right AG demonstrated greater positive task-responsive activity for relational compounds, there was a greater negative deflection in the BOLD response in left AG for relational compounds. In left ATL, we found an earlier peak in subjects’ BOLD response curves for attributive interpretations. In other words, we observed dissociations in both AG and ATL between relational and attributive nominal compounds, with regard to magnitude in the former and to timing in the latter. These findings expand on prior studies that posit roles for both AG and ATL in conceptual processing generally, and in conceptual combination specifically, by indicating possible functional specializations of these two regions within a larger conceptual knowledge network.

Introduction

Language’s infinite generative capacity allows us to produce utterances ranging from the prosaic, as in “Close the door,” to the ridiculous, as in “Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers” (Stephen Fry, A Bit of Fry and Laurie). Less ridiculous, but no less novel, sentences are uttered every day, and the ability of a reader or listener to understand such novel sentences, the propositional meanings of which cannot be retrieved from memory, requires a compositional algorithm that takes word meanings and combines them in such a way as to produce a more complex meaning. The neural substrates of this compositional algorithm remain elusive, in part because we still lack consensus on a typology of compositional operations.

Many approaches to the study of composition have benefitted from a clear distinction between syntactic and semantic composition (Kuperberg et al., 2008, Pylkkänen and McElree, 2006). Studies on Jabberwocky sentences demonstrate that subjects parse Jabberwocky phrases into syntactic hierarchical constituents similar to their natural language counterparts, even without knowing what the phrase means (e.g. “the mouse that eats our cheese” vs. the Jabberwocky version “the couse that rits our treeve” (example from Pallier, Devauchelle, & Dehaene, 2011)). Studies of complement coercion also suggest that syntactic and semantic argument structures are not isomorphic: evidence from behavioral, eye-tracking, and electrophysiological measures demonstrate a processing cost where semantic material unexpressed in the syntax must be inserted in order to coerce a coherent argument structure; e.g. “The man began the book” is interpreted as “The man began [reading/writing] the book” via implicit insertion of some event information (Baggio et al., 2010, Kuperberg et al., 2009, McElree et al., 2006, Pylkkänen and McElree, 2007, Traxler et al., 2005).

In this study, we proceed one step further, and suggest that within the domain of semantic composition, there is evidence for a distinction between two basic combinatorial operations, even when syntax is held constant. Specifically, we investigate the case of noun-noun compounds, in which the structure is always a modifier noun followed by a head noun (e.g. mountain lake, where the syntax dictates this is a lake (in the mountains), not a mountain (in a lake)). Noun-noun compounds are a tractable case of minimal composition and are particularly interesting because the first noun – the modifier noun – can be either “attributive” (as in zebra clam, where zebra denotes the attribute “striped”) or “relational” (as in mountain lake where “mountain” is not an attribute but an object bearing a spatial relation with “lake”). Attributive combinations are similar to predicating combinations, which can be paraphrased as “a [noun] that is [adjective],” such as red ball (“a ball that is red”). Non-predicating combinations, on the other hand, cannot be paraphrased in such a way: e.g. tennis ball is not “a ball that is tennis,” but rather is “a ball for playing tennis” (Downing, 1977, Gagné and Shoben, 1997, Levi, 1978). Attributive noun-noun compounds can be paraphrased as “a [head noun] that is [modifier noun]-like”, as in zebra clam – “a clam that is zebra-like” (likely “a clam that is striped”). Relational noun-noun compounds are more complex in that they are non-predicating, and derive their meaning from some extrinsic predicating relation (e.g. “a ball for playing tennis”) (Levi, 1978, Murphy, 1990).

We find evidence that relational and attributive interpretations of noun compounds differentially engage two regions of the brain otherwise broadly implicated in semantic composition: the angular gyrus (AG) and the anterior temporal lobe (ATL). Below, we discuss how the distinction between relational and attributive combination may shed light on the functional differences between these two putative neural “hubs” of semantic composition.

Mounting evidence suggests ATL and AG are involved in semantic processing, generally, and in semantic composition, specifically; however, only recently has there been effort to characterize their division of labor. Both have been characterized as “semantic hubs,” owing to functional and anatomical patterns that are consistent with multimodal convergence (Binder and Desai, 2011, Lambon Ralph, 2014, Patterson et al., 2007, Seghier, 2012). The ATL is uniquely situated at the end of a caudal-to-rostral stream of information processing feeding from primary sensory and motor areas and association cortex (Binder and Desai, 2011, Binder et al., 2009, Binney et al., 2012, Felleman and Van Essen, 1991). Moving anteriorly along the temporal lobe, one finds a caudal-to-rostral hierarchy emerge as neuronal responses are more tuned to complex stimuli and more invariant to low-level sensory variation; such a hierarchy has been established along both visual (Felleman & Van Essen, 1991) and auditory (Rauschecker & Scott, 2009) streams. This “graded convergence” may provide a mechanism both for attributive feature combination and, in the limit, for maximally invariant amodal, abstract conceptual representations. The culmination of this graded convergence up the temporal lobe (Rauschecker and Scott, 2009, Stringer and Rolls, 2002) is a basal rostral region of ATL shown to have very limited extra-temporal connectivity and high intra-temporal connectivity (Binney et al., 2012). Such neuroanatomical sequestration may be conducive to representing abstract, modality-invariant semantics. Thus, ATL is a prime candidate for attributive semantic composition.

In one of the first studies investigating the neural correlates of minimal two-word composition, Baron, Thompson-Schill, Weber, and Osherson (2010) found evidence from fMRI pattern analyses that the left ATL subserved the combination of concepts such that the superimposition of individual patterns of the simplex concepts YOUNG and MAN (as represented by various face stimuli) reliably predicted the activation pattern for the complex concept YOUNG MAN. Consistent with this finding, a magnetoencephalography (MEG) study of visually presented two-word phrases comparing nouns in minimal compositional contexts (red boat) with nouns in non-compositional contexts (in which a non-word letter string was concatenated with a real word, e.g. xkq boat) found increased composition-related activity in left ATL (Bemis & Pylkkänen, 2011). There is a growing body of functional and tractographic studies to suggest that the representational unit of property-based composition in left ATL may be multimodal sensorimotor features, particularly visual concrete properties of object-concepts in more ventromedial regions of ATL, and possibly more abstract auditory-visual properties in more dorsolateral regions of ATL (Coutanche and Thompson-Schill, 2014, Hoffman et al., 2015), corroborating the notion of the left ATL as hub of the so-called ventral “what” pathway.

In addition to the ATL, researchers have also ascribed the label “semantic hub” to the AG, as it lies at the junction between temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes and thus receives a confluence of auditory, somatosensory, spatial, and visual inputs. Conceptual combination studies of the sort described above (Bemis & Pylkkänen, 2012) have demonstrated involvement of both left AG and left ATL, and several studies implicate bilateral AG in the contrast between well-formed sentences on the one hand and word lists, pseudowords, or scrambled sentences on the other (Bavelier et al., 1997, Bottini et al., 1994, Humphries et al., 2007, Humphries et al., 2006). AG also shows greater activity for semantic violations vs. congruent well-formed sentences (Kang, Constable, Gore, & Avrutin, 1999), particularly semantic incongruities violating verb-argument structure and thematic constraints rather than real-world knowledge (Kuperberg et al., 2008, Newman et al., 2001), and also for connected discourse vs. unrelated sentences (Fletcher et al., 1995, Homae et al., 2003, Xu et al., 2005). This broad profile of effects has led some to suggest that the AG may play a potentially domain-general role in semantic information integration structured around events.

Not all studies investigating conceptual combination find activation in both left ATL and bilateral AG. Of those stimuli that elicit differential activity in AG but not in left ATL, one finds that the type of composition may more often be based on thematic relations rather than attributive combination. Graves, Binder, Desai, Conant, and Seidenberg (2010) compared familiar meaningful noun-noun compounds, such as lake house, with reversed phrases, such as house lake, the meanings of which were not obvious; they found that right AG, along with other right-lateralized temporoparietal areas, showed greater activation for processing the more obviously combinatorial phrases. Interestingly, the authors noted that most of their noun-noun stimuli were interpreted as denoting thematic relations between head and modifier nouns; that is, most compounds consisted of nouns participating in some spatial relation (as in “a house on a lake”) or event-based relation rather than picking out an attribute of the modifier noun. It is likely that these stimuli were probing semantic thematic relations in particular rather than combinatorial semantics in general.

In order to further distinguish between property-based associations and relation-based associations between concepts, consider the following nominal compound: robin hawk. Wisniewski (1996) found that people’s interpretations of a novel compound of this sort could be characterized in one of two ways. Some individuals applied a property of the concept “robin,” such as a red breast, to the head noun “hawk,” to arrive at an interpretation like “a red-breasted hawk.” Others found a thematic relation between the two birds, noting that a hawk might hunt a robin, and interpreted “robin hawk” as “a hawk that preys on robins.” In the first type of interpretation, “robin” indicated some attribute or feature commensurate with the head noun “hawk,” while in the second type of interpretation, the modifier noun “robin” was not broken down into features, but rather participated in a thematic relation with the head noun “hawk.”

It is worth noting here that the terminology “relational” and “attributive” bear the misfortune of being both very common and denoting very different qualities depending on the theoretical framework. For instance, there are certain non-deverbal “relational” nouns, like sister, boss, edge, height, etc., that seem to take implicit semantic arguments (Partee & Borschev, 2003), but we do not consider such relational nouns here. However, “relational” and “attributive” eschew the perhaps overly syntactic typology of, say, “predicating vs. non-predicating,” in describing a phenomenon we argue arises from conceptual-semantic affordances; that is, robin hawk is interpretable as “a hawk that hunts robins” only because of the association between hawk and hunting, even though the “hunting” relation is unstated (cf. robin chicken, which would be unlikely to invite such a predator-prey relation). Therefore, we will refer to these nominal compound types as “relational” and “attributive.”

Earlier literature assumed that the thematic relation was the primary means of interpreting nominal compounds: the consensus was that only after failing to find a plausible thematic relation binding the modifier and head nouns did people derive a property-based interpretation (Downing, 1977, Gagné and Shoben, 1997, Shoben and Gagné, 1997, Wisniewski and Gentner, 1991). Later proposals recognized attributive interpretations as somewhat distinct, but still considered property-based combinations too infrequent to be considered a different process; while Wisniewski and Love (1998) reported that attributive interpretations accounted for 29% of their nominal compounds, other samples reported attributives occurring as little as 1% of the time in corpora (Downing, 1977, Gagné, 2000, Warren, 1978). Parsimony dictated that attributive interpretations were simply another kind of relation, namely a resemblance relation (where zebra clam is merely a clam that resembles a zebra), and a single-process model prevailed (Costello and Keane, 2000, Gagné, 2000). One prominent formulation of single-process conceptual combination is the Competition Among Relations in Nominals (CARIN) theory (Gagné & Shoben, 1997). Under this account, the modifier noun (zebra in zebra clam, or mountain in mountain lake) is not incorporated into the head noun’s representation, but rather a relation (e.g. noun RESEMBLE modifier, or noun LOCATED modifier, respectively) is inserted that links the two concepts. Moreover, under CARIN, some relations will be considered prior to others, depending on the lexical items being combined (e.g. LOCATED is a more apt relation than ABOUT when construing the compound mountain lake). This model stipulates that the RESEMBLE relation (that is, the attributive interpretation) is largely dispreferred.

However, further study found evidence for a categorical distinction between a relation-linking process like that described under CARIN, and another process, by which a property or attribute of the modifier is “transferred” to the head noun (attributive combination). Several studies found that the interpretation of ambiguous nominal compounds (such as robin hawk) could be manipulated based on priming the ambiguous item with relational or attributive compounds. Wisniewski and Love (1998) found that ambiguous targets were more likely to be interpreted attributively when following an attributive-biased compound, but more likely to be interpreted as relational when preceded by a relational prime. This suggests that attributive and relational processes are categorically distinct processes (but cf. Gagné, 2000). Estes (2003) followed this work with another priming study, testing whether relational interpretations occurred serially prior to attributive interpretations, or whether these processes occurred in parallel. He found that both comprehension and reaction times were facilitated when target combinations matched prime combinations in attribution or relation. Moreover, Estes (2003) tested the CARIN model’s serial relation prediction that there should be an interaction between prime type and target type: if relation precedes attribution, then an attributive prime should interfere with interpretation of a relational target while a relational target should not hinder comprehension of an attributive target. That is, under the CARIN account, an attributive prime would involve additional (attributive) processing not otherwise induced during a relational prime, and this extra processing would interfere with comprehension of a relational target. Estes (2003) did not find such an interaction, and interpreted these findings as inconsistent with CARIN. However, this null result is not particularly damning to the CARIN model, and evidence arbitrating whether attributive and relational compound interpretation involve distinct processes remains equivocal.

The distinction between property- and relation-based semantic processes also appears in the neuropsychological semantic memory literature. Here, one abiding question has been: Do relational and attributive conceptual combinations arise from neuroanatomically separable components of the semantics, or are they subsumed by the same combinatorial operation? If the latter, are these operations hierarchically disposed in some way: that is, are relational interpretations preferred over attributive interpretations, or vice versa?

In the semantic memory literature, the distinction between so-called taxonomic and thematic associations serve as a parallel to what we have described as attributive and relational associations, respectively. The literature on taxonomic and thematic associations does not relate explicitly to nominal compound interpretation, or even conceptual combination per se, and the experimental paradigms focus rather on speech errors, priming, and judgment of semantic association between words that are not part of a compositional phrase. However, we argue that the semantic ontology of “properties” vs. “relations” underlying the distinction between taxonomic and thematic associations also defines the distinction between attributive and relational interpretations of compounds, and thus both literatures should be explored in tandem.

Just as the conceptual combination literature includes theories in which attributive and relational combination are part of the same process and not categorically distinct (as in CARIN), so does the semantic memory literature accommodate models whereby taxonomic and thematic relations are not or need not be distinguished. For instance, under many connectionist frameworks, thematic relations are reified into features, such that the concept dog might be linked not only to nodes for “furry,” “warm-blooded,” and “loyal,” but also nodes for explicitly relation-based facts, such as “bears live young,” “is led on a leash,” and “chews/buries bones” (Rogers & McClelland, 2004). Another account holds that taxonomic properties are the constituents of thematic relations: for instance, the thematic relation chew, between, say, dog and bone, is supervenient on knowledge of the properties of dog and bone, so that thematic processing cannot occur without taxonomic processing (Lewis, Poeppel, & Murphy, 2015). This account is supported by an MEG priming study finding that activity in left ATL was only sensitive to property-based taxonomic associations, while both taxonomic and thematic associations predicted activity in the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ), inclusive of AG (Lewis et al., 2015). Both these accounts contrast with a model whereby thematic relations constitute a qualitatively different level of representation from taxonomic features or properties, where the unit of representation is the event rather than the feature (Boylan, Trueswell, & Thompson-Schill, 2015).

Another study, however, found evidence of a double dissociation between taxonomic and thematic semantic errors in left ATL and left AG, respectively (Schwartz et al., 2011). Speakers’ semantic errors can be divided into either taxonomic category errors (that is, uttering an incorrect word, but one which has commensurate features, such as when “apple” is named as “pear”) or thematic relation errors (that is, uttering “dog” when “bone” was intended, reflecting the thematic relation between “dog” and “bone”). Schwartz et al. (2011) examined the taxonomic and thematic errors produced by 86 post-stroke aphasics in a picture-naming task and conducted voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) on each error type separately (with shared variance between error types regressed out). Taxonomic errors were mapped to left ATL lesions, while thematic errors were localized to left AG. This double dissociation between ATL and AG supports the view that the ATL and AG support categorically distinct semantic computations, corresponding to property-based and relation-based operations, respectively.

The current study examines the neural dissociation between property- and relation-based conceptual combination in order to discern (1) whether these processes are indeed functionally distinct and (2) whether they might allow us to better characterize the roles of AG and ATL in semantic combination. While the double dissociation of the sort reported in Schwartz et al. (2011) would be indicative of entirely dissociable systems, it is also possible that a common underlying semantic process derives both sorts of combination. Midway between these two hypotheses is the possibility that these two types of combination are both functionally and neurally distinct, but recruit overlapping brain networks.

We find evidence for (1) a single dissociation in bilateral AG showing more task-responsive activity for relational compounds than attributive compounds, and (2) a timing difference in ATL, specifically an earlier ATL response to attributive compounds than relational compounds. This order is not consistent with that put forth in the CARIN model, which predicts that relational combinations are processed prior to attributive combinations, but is consistent with a model where the distinction between attributive and relational processing could be more fluid in ATL.

Section snippets

Participants

Eighteen subjects (eleven female) participated in this study. Subjects ranged in age from 18 to 42 years, and all were right-handed native speakers of English with normal or corrected-to-normal vision and no reported history of neurologic problems. Subjects gave written informed consent and were provided monetary compensation ($20/h) for their time. The human subjects review board at the University of Pennsylvania approved all experimental procedures.

Stimulus design

We drew our nominal compound stimuli from two

Task-responsive voxels in anatomical ROIs

In a group-level contrast targeting bilateral AG and bilateral ATL, we found several clusters of voxels with a reliable (p < 0.01, uncorrected) activation difference between task (comprehension of nominal compound) and ITI fixation baseline, where the task condition collapsed attributive and relational trials together (Fig. 2). Two distinct clusters of activity were revealed in left AG, where one cluster was positively activated for task relative to baseline (cluster centroid: [−45 −54 38]

Discussion

This study sought to determine whether, and how, relational and attributive interpretations of nominal compounds differentially engaged putative “semantic hubs,” the left ATL and bilateral AG. We found evidence that both relational and attributive processes engaged ATL and AG, but that each brain region responded very differently to the relational-attributive dichotomy. Both right and left AG showed differential responses to relational and attributive compounds, with relational compounds

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants R0I-DC009209 and R01-EY021717 to S.T.-S. and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to C.B. The authors wish to thank members of the Thompson-Schill and Trueswell labs, as well as participants in the Common Ground seminars at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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