Context Sensitivity of Relational Nouns

We present findings that relational nouns are more contextsensitive than entity nouns in two conceptual combination recognition tasks. Across two experiments, we investigated people’s ability to recognize entity nouns and relational nouns either in the same context as at encoding or in a different context. We found that (1) participants showed greater recognition sensitivity for entity nouns than for relational nouns and (2) relational nouns showed a greater disadvantage in recognition in new contexts relative to old contexts. Thus, the encoding of relational nouns appears to be more influenced by context than the encoding of entity nouns. We discuss parallels with encoding patterns for verbs and nouns.