Abstract
Abstract The mental lexicon stores words and information about words. The lexicon is seen by many researchers as a network, where lexical units are nodes and the different links between the units are connections. Based on the analysis of a word association network, in this article we show that different kinds of associative connections exist in the mental lexicon. Our analysis is based on a word association database from the agglutinative language Hungarian. We use communities – closely knit groups – of the lexicon to provide evidence for the existence and coexistence of different connections. We search for communities in the database using two different algorithms, enabling us to see the overlapping (a word belongs to multiple communities) and non-overlapping (a word belongs to only one community) community structures. Our results show that the network of the lexicon is organized by semantic, phonetic, syntactic and grammatical connections, but encyclopedic knowledge and individual experiences are also shaping the associative structure. We also show that words may be connected not just by one, but more types of connections at the same time.
Highlights
The mental lexicon – dictionary of mind – stores information in lexical units
It has been suggested in the literature before that this network of the mind is a multilayered network: different kinds of connections exist in the lexicon which can be assigned to different layers (Stella et al 2018)
This allows us to look at the structure of the word association network from three different perspectives and avoid the potential shortcomings of the individual approaches
Summary
The mental lexicon – dictionary of mind – stores information in lexical units. These units do not stand alone: they are connected to each other, enabling the activation of the units. The network character of the lexicon is receiving more and more attention from researchers, almost all studies are done on databases of Indo-European languages. It has been suggested in the literature before that this network of the mind is a multilayered network: different kinds of connections exist in the lexicon which can be assigned to different layers (Stella et al 2018). Wikipedia can be considered as a network, where the nodes are the pages of Wikipedia and the hyperlinks between these pages are the links (for an overview and more examples see Barabási 2016 and Menczer et al 2020)
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