The Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon

Abstract

AbstractThe present handbook is a state-of-the-art compilation of papers from leading scholars on the mental lexicon—the representation of language in the mind/brain at the level of individual words and meaningful sub-word units. In recent years, the study of words as mental objects has grown rapidly across several fields including linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, education, and computational cognitive science. This comprehensive collection spans multiple disciplines, topics, theories, and methods, to highlight important advances in the study of the mental lexicon, identify areas of debate, and inspire innovation in the field from present and future generations of scholars. The book is divided into three parts. Part I presents modern linguistic and cognitive theories of how the mind/brain represents words at the phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels. This part also discusses broad architectural issues pertaining to the organization of the lexicon, the relation between words and concepts, and the role of compositionality. Part II discusses how children learn the form and meaning of words in their native language drawing from the key domains of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Multiple approaches to lexical learning are introduced to explain how learner- and environment-driven factors contribute to both the stability and the variability of lexical learning across both individual learners and communities. Part III examines how the mental lexicon contributes to language use during listening, speaking, and conversation, and includes perspectives from bilingualism, sign languages, and disorders of lexical access and production.