Unveiling the nature of interaction between semantics and phonology in lexical access based on multilayer networks

Orr Levy,Shlomo Havlin,Nichol Castro,Yoed N Kenett,Michael S Vitevitch,Simon De Deyne,Orr Oxenberg

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-93925-y

Abstract

An essential aspect of human communication is the ability to access and retrieve information from ones’ ‘mental lexicon’. This lexical access activates phonological and semantic components of concepts, yet the question whether and how these two components relate to each other remains widely debated. We harness tools from network science to construct a large-scale linguistic multilayer network comprising of phonological and semantic layers. We find that the links in the two layers are highly similar to each other and that adding information from one layer to the other increases efficiency by decreasing the network overall distances, but specifically affecting shorter distances. Finally, we show how a multilayer architecture demonstrates the highest efficiency, and how this efficiency relates to weak semantic relations between cue words in the network. Thus, investigating the interaction between the layers and the unique benefit of a linguistic multilayer architecture allows us to quantify theoretical cognitive models of lexical access.

Highlights

An essential aspect of human communication is the ability to access and retrieve information from ones’ ‘mental lexicon’
We found a gradual effect of semantic links according to their strength on reducing distances compared to random links; strong semantic links have the smallest effect on distance reduction, suggesting that the relation of the semantic layer to the phonological layer is gradually decreasing with decreasing semantic strength
To achieve meaningful linguistic communications, one must access and retrieve information from their ‘mental lexicon’, which stores the representations of concepts

Summary

Introduction

An essential aspect of human communication is the ability to access and retrieve information from ones’ ‘mental lexicon’. We examined what drives this effect, by investigating which semantic path distances were reduced as a result of adding non-overlapping phonological links, compared to adding randomly chosen links.

Results

Conclusion