The process for combining concepts into complex meaning is fundamental to human language and thought. Complex meanings can be formed by grammatical composition (e.g., “coffee mug”) or by simply associating two words together in memory (e.g., “coffee, mug”). These two processes, though conceptually different, have been shown to activate similar brain regions. For example, compositional phrases such as “red boat” elicit an increased left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) activity as compared to non-compositional phrases (e.g., Bemis & Pylkkänen, 2011; Pylkkänen, 2016), yet this region is also involved in associative encoding tasks such as face-location associations (e.g., Nieuwenhuis et al., 2012). The current study is the first to directly compare the two processes in the LATL. We applied distributional semantic models to disentangle semantic association from semantic composition and tested whether the LATL is indeed sensitive to semantic composition or simply tracks the association between words.