Concepts in context: Evidence from a feature-norming study

Concepts are typically conceived as context-free knowledge structures. Recently, a different view has emerged according to which subjects produce situation-specific conceptualizations, thereby raising important questions about the level of contextual dependency in conceptual representations. In this paper, we present a feature-norming study in which subjects are asked to generate properties of concepts presented in context. Collected data are analysed to investigate the actual amount of conceptual variation induced by contexts and the effect of context modality.