Flexible semantic processing of spatial prepositions

This article presents two experiments investigating whether language users spontaneously apply semantic extension principles to novel usages, or whether they treat word meanings as discrete, rigidly defined entities. In Experiment I, readers made a timed decision on the correctness of a sentence. Rejecting a cognitively plausible yet unattested extension of a preposition (*Peter is standing by the county) took longer and lead to more errors than rejecting a plainly incorrect usage of that preposition (*Peter is standing by the subtitle). This result was obtained for two novel extensions of two different prepositions. Experiment 2 included a preceding context in order to fix the referent of the target word and to exclude singular interpretations. The results were consistent with those of Experiment 1, although the overall number of errors dropped considerably. Taken together, these experiments indicate that, even in a task discouraging the use of flexible processing, subjects are not able to suppress the application of extension principles. We conclude that interpreting the meanings of words in a flexible way is an inherent property of a semantic processing system.