This empirical research attempts to examine how the advanced Chinese learners of English use the two major cognitive mechanisms in understanding English N+N combined concepts. The results manifest that the subjects have a strong tendency to reject the meaningfulness of property mapping N+N concepts built by structural alignment mechanism and they prefer to turn to the scenario creation mechanism for an explanation of English N+N concepts in terms of relation linking. This propensity suggests that N+N concepts in need of property mapping explanation are still a difficult cognitive area for the advanced Chinese learners of English and that the transferred mother tongue cognitive mechanism functions in a negative way in their understanding of English N+N combined concepts.