Abstract: Conceptual combination involves accessing two or more concepts and forms a new concept termed combined concept. Previous research focused on how people understand noun-noun combined concepts and the related factors on interpretation strategy. There are many models, such as Competition Among Relations in Nominals Theory, Dual-Process Theory, and Constraint Theory. These theories explained well specific experimental phenomena, however, they failed to explain some stable phenomena, such as emergent feature and category effect. This article proposes that the future research should integrate all the existent experimental phenomena and theories, focus on the time course of conceptual combination, further investigate the role of context, and systemically study emergent feature and category effect of conceptual combination.

Key words: conceptual combination, combined concept, relation, schema, pragmatics, category specificity.