Sense Creation in and out of Discourse Contexts

What does Evian boy mean? Researchers have offered a variety of theories to predict readers' interpretations of such noun-noun combinations outside discourse contexts. But in what ways do these out of discourse context interpretations contribute to the determination of discourse meanings? We define two views: the interdependence view suggests that the time course of meaning recovery in discourse contexts is affected by out of discourse context interpretations; the independence view does not posit such a relationship. Experiments 1 and 2 established pairs of noun-noun combinations (such as doll smile and baseball smile) that differed reliably with respect to accessibility of meanings out of discourse contexts. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that noun-noun combinations with highly accessible out of discourse context meanings did not experience interference when they were endowed with different, innovative meanings in discourse contexts. We suggest that the pattern of data is inconsistent with the interdependence view.