The Mental Lexicon

Abstract

The term Mental Lexicon, sometimes seen as an online version of a dictionary, is often taken to refer to the part of our language system that hosts the word forms we know and their corresponding meanings. Unlike a dictionary, words in the Mental Lexicon are not organized strictly alphabetically (although speech errors such as malapropisms, e.g., appointment –> apartment, suggest that words having a form relationship are somehow relatedly represented) but stored according to principles of meaning, form, frequency, and possibly other aspects. Form refers to the phonological make-up of words, but also to orthography (spelling) or gestures. Moreover, words must be mentally represented and organized in an easily accessible way to support efficient processing—both in comprehension and production. However, how are words represented and connected to each other in the Mental Lexicon? It is clear that our brain must have the capacity to store word forms and their meanings because understanding and producing words are important skills of the human language user and both processes involve form and meaning. Theories of language comprehension and language production include ideas about the organization and representation of words in the Mental Lexicon. Comprehension and production is one important dichotomy reflected in this article. Another contrast is the difference between representation and processing. Representation of units in the Mental Lexicon, be it bundles of words, individual words, morphemes, syllables, phonemes, or features, is rather static. When we learn a word, it is important to store the correct pronunciation, spelling, or gestures with the particular meaning. Processing, however, is more dynamic. When we hear or produce a word, a number of (dynamic) cognitive processes are being executed that operate on (static) representations in the Mental Lexicon. When we hear an acoustic signal corresponding to words we know, our language comprehension system can recognize those words and map them to corresponding meanings resulting in speech comprehension. A similar process takes place when we read text written in a language we can read. Visual word forms are being recognized and mapped onto meanings leading to text comprehension. If word forms are not stored in our brain, we cannot recognize them and thus we are not able to understand what is being said or written down. This happens when we listen to speech or read words in a language we do not know. When we produce speech, we start with the intention to convey a certain message making access to stored information in the Mental Lexicon necessary. The exact information that is being stored in the Mental Lexicon and how it is stored and accessed, is still being investigated. This bibliography will especially be concerned with features of form representation of words, i.e., morphology and phonology, and less so with the representation of meaning, i.e., semantics.