Previous research has shown that people use linguistic distributional information during conceptual processing, and that it is especially useful for shallow tasks and
rapid responding. Using two conceptual combination tasks,
we showed that this linguistic shortcut extends to the processing of novel stimuli, is used in both successful and
unsuccessful conceptual processing, and is evident in both
shallow and deep conceptual tasks. Specifically, as predicted
by the ECCo theory of conceptual combination, people use
the linguistic shortcut as a “quick-and-dirty” guide to
whether the concepts are likely to combine into a coherent
conceptual representation, in both shallow sensibility judgment and deep interpretation generation tasks. Linguistic
distributional frequency predicts both the likelihood and
the time course of rejecting a novel word compound as
nonsensical or uninterpretable. However, it predicts the time
course of successful processing only in shallow sensibility
judgment, because the deeper conceptual process of interpretation generation does not allow the linguistic shortcut to
suffice. Furthermore, the effects of linguistic distributional
frequency are independent of any effects of conventional
word frequency. We discuss the utility of the linguistic
shortcut as a cognitive triage mechanism that can optimize
processing in a limited-resource conceptual system.