While this large dataset on the LATL is still compatible with many
definitions of “semantic processing”, the robustness of these findings
and their generality across multiple methodologies presents an opportunity
for a systematic investigation of the computational details of
this activity. One step towards sharpening our understanding involves
recent MEG results on language production (Del Prato and Pylkkänen,
2014), where the modification of object denoting nouns with color adjectives
(blue cups) engaged the LATL,while numerical quantification of
the same nouns (two cups) did not. Given that both of these combinations
involve semantic composition, these data are incompatible with
a general semantic composition account of the LATL. Instead, they suggest
a narrower computation, perhaps better characterized as a type
of “conceptual combination”, a label employed in the concepts and categories
literature for a host of cases where, intuitively, the combination
of two concepts serves to form a more complex one, typical examples
being adjective–noun and noun–noun combinations. Given that in
phrases such as two cups, two does not add a feature to the concept denoted
by cup but rather enumerates the number of tokens in a set of
cups, such caseswould, by hypothesis, fall outside the definition of conceptual
combination that is relevant for the LATL. Related evidence for
the conceptual nature of the LATL include the sensitivity of its combinatory
response to conceptual specificity (Westerlund and Pylkkänen,
2014; Zhang and Pylkkänen, 2015) and the correlation between the
LATL activation elicited by specific concepts like boy and the product
of the activations for their constituent concepts (i.e., male and child)
(Baron and Osherson, 2011).