In their article, "Testing two theories of conceptual combination: Alignmen
t versus diagnosticity in the comprehension and production of combined conc
epts," F. J. Costello and M. T. Keane (2001) evaluate the role of alignment
in the interpretation of noun-noun combinations. They found that participa
nts were not strongly biased to prefer and produce interpretations with ali
gnable differences. Instead, participants sometimes preferred and produced
interpretations with nonalignable differences. These results are surprising
given that most research has found advantages of alignable differences ove
r nonalignable differences. Costello and Keane also found that feature diag
nosticity better predicted their results, and they concluded that alignment
does not play an important role in conceptual combination. However, drawin
g on recent work the author of the present article gives an alternative int
erpretation of Costello and Keane's results, showing that alignment is cruc
ial in conceptual combination. The author also shows that the dual-process
model accounts for their results.