Mental Lexicon Research Articles

한국어 선어말어미의 심리어휘부 표상

A 'priming lexical decision task' and a 'self-paced reading task' were conducted to investigate the representation in the mental lexicon of Korean prefinal endings. We observed the extent to which prefinal endings are likely to have their own representation in the lexicon according to three factors: 'type of prefinal ending,' 'frequency of the stem,' and 'frequency of conjunction between prefinal endings and final endings,' and found that prefinal endings with high-frequency stems were significantly more likely to have their own representation than those with low-frequency stems. The type of prefinal ending and the frequency of conjunction between prefinal endings and final endings had no significant effect on the likelihood of being represented independently, and the entire conjugation was more likely to be represented. The experimental results suggest that Korean speakers' mental lexicon has a dual structure of a surface lexicon and a deep lexicon, in which all lexical conjugations are stored in the surface lexicon, and some conjugations containing high-frequency stems are separated into stems and endings and stored in the deep lexicon, where they function as objects of reference.

Behavioural evidence for implicative paradigmatic relations

Abstract Form predictability has long been known to influence speaker behaviour in language learning and use. However, this observation has largely remained dissociated from the question of the most apt theoretical framing of the effects observed. We set out to seek evidence that speakers’ relationship to form predictability is best characterised in paradigmatic terms: in an experimental task comparable to prediction of one word form from a related one, speakers appear sensitive to the probabilistic, implicative relations that make up a morphological paradigm. We find this effect to be omnidirectional, from any paradigm cell to any paradigm cell. Form predictability does not impact speaker behaviour in a vacuum, but instead works together with aspects of memory and learning to organise the mental lexicon and inform language use. In a corpus study, we map out the complex relationships that exist between paradigmatic form predictability, lexeme frequency and cell frequency in the context of naturalistic language use. Speakers appear to exploit all available probabilistic relationships between the word forms of a language in a way that is predicted by Word and Paradigm theories of morphology, with memory and predictive processing playing a mediating role in all aspects of language use.

When Negative Turns out to Be Positive

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on various aspects of society, including language and cognitive processes. This research investigates how the pandemic has influenced associations related to health-related words among 1,454 Estonian native speakers. Data collected between January and March 2023 were compared with a pre-pandemic dataset, the Dictionary of Estonian Word Associations (DEWA), compiled from 2016 to 2018. The study focuses on fifteen health-related cue words. The results revealed that five terms experienced significant changes in their association sequences concerning the COVID-19 crisis. Notably, among these 15 words, three stand out as the most significant cases where a change occurred in their primary responses: these typically exhibit the most robust and enduring associative links, making them less susceptible to change. This unveils shifts in the mental lexicon's representations and the evolving perceptions of specific words and concepts amidst the pandemic backdrop. These findings illustrate how unforeseen external disruptions, such as the COVID-19 crisis, can reconfigure the salience of certain concepts within language and cognition. This research contributes to our comprehension of the linguistic repercussions and potential language adaptations triggered by a health crisis. It also enriches the relatively understudied field of word association research, particularly in languages beyond the dominion of English.

Istirātījiyyātu al-Nafādi Ilá al-Muʻjami al-Żihnī lada Talāmīżi al-Sanati al-Śāliśati min al-Taʻlīmi al-Śānawī al-Iʻdādiyyi [Mental Lexicon Access Strategies for Students of the Third Year of Preparatory Secondary Education

Lexical units are organized within the mental lexicon, and the processes of constructing, processing, and accessing them are organized according to extremely complex mental pathways. This requires language speakers to activate them and use them quickly and effectively in their linguistic achievement. The more the speaker's access to his mental lexicon is sound, the more he can communicate successfully in different linguistic contexts. This research paper attempts to contribute to deriving some appropriate strategies for accessing the mental lexicon according to the parametric peculiarities of the Arabic language by linking these strategies to four basic criteria (the criterion of phonetic similarity, the criterion of spelling form, the criterion of semantic similarity, the criterion of grammatical predicate). This study was based on field research that targeted a sample of 40 students belonging to the third year of preparatory secondary education within a Moroccan public educational institution. The study used tests related to linguistic information that allows access to lexical units within the mental lexicon, aiming to analyze and measure them in the student's linguistic achievement. The results revealed that there is a strong influence of standards of access to the mental lexicon on the performance of learners in written expression and that there is a large gap between what is stipulated in educational documents and what students produce in their construction writings based on their level in this academic level.

Evidence for conflict monitoring during speech recognition in noise.

During difficult tasks, conflict can benefit performance on a subsequent trial. One theory for such performance adjustments is that people monitor for conflict and reactively engage cognitive control. This hypothesis has been challenged because tasks that control for associative learning do not show such "cognitive control" effects. The current study experimentally controlled associative learning by presenting a novel stimulus on every trial of a picture-speech conflict task and found that performance adjustments still occur. Thirty-one healthy young adults listened to and repeated words presented in background noise while viewing pictures that were congruent or incongruent (i.e., phonological neighbors) with the word. Following conflict, participants had higher word recognition (+17% points) on incongruent but not congruent trials. This result was not attributable to posterror effects nor a speed-accuracy trade-off. An analysis of erroneous responses showed that participants made more phonologically related errors than nonrelated errors only on incongruent trials, demonstrating elevated phonological conflict when the picture was a neighbor of the target word. Additionally, postconflict improvements appear to be due to better resolution of phonological conflict in the mental lexicon rather than decreased attention to the picture or increased attention to the speech signal. Our findings provide new evidence for conflict monitoring and suggest that cognitive control helps resolve phonological conflict during speech recognition in noise.

다의어 break 번역 시 한국어의 영향

Objectives This study investigates the Korean language (L1) influence on the understanding of multiple senses of English (L2) word ‘break’ from a language transfer perspective. Methods To achieve this, a survey questionnaire was constructed using 12 sentences with the different senses of break selected in descending order of frequency from the iWeb corpus. Depending on their English proficiency, 90 university students were recruited into tri-level proficiency (i.e., elementary, intermediate, advanced) groups, each containing 30 people. The participants were asked to translate 12 different senses of break, provide multiple responses for the senses they had prior knowledge of, and give a single response for the most challenging sense while explaining their choice. Results This study yielded four main findings. First, as the corpus frequency of each sense increases, the trans-lation accuracy of participants tended to rise, indicating a higher comprehension of core senses with higher fre-quency senses and lower comprehension of peripheral senses with lower frequency senses. Second, senses with Korean equivalents exhibited higher translation accuracy than those without them, highlighting the positive trans-fer of senses with Korean equivalents. Third, the elementary proficiency group showed a larger effect size of Korean similarity compared to other groups, indicating that semantic properties of Korean have a more impact on it. The elementary group also exhibited a larger effect size of corpus frequency compared to other groups, sug-gesting a tendency for the mental lexicon to be more fixed on the core senses. The sense similarity between ‘상처가 나게 하다’ and ‘break skin’ tended to fail to be recognized, while ‘break the code’ has no equivalent sense in Korean, yet the translated phrase ‘암호를 깨다’ from ‘crack the code’ was exposed, thus triggering a distinctive pat-tern of positive transfer. Both examples indicate that learners' psychological perceptions play a more important role in language transfer than objective linguistic properties. Conclusions While this study demonstrates the persistent influence of the first language on semantic transfer, it suggests that the impact of L1 may diminish as English proficiency improves and L2 learners may develop a mental lexicon that diverges from the influence of their L1. Future research is expected to explore the different conceptual structures of polysemous words across languages, and to investigate the effect of psychological per-ception on language transfer by using the research methodology that compares the findings on languages that use same scripts and languages that use cross-scrips.

Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

Abstract The Discriminative Lexicon is a theory of the mental lexicon that brings together insights from various other theories: words are the relevant cognitive units in morphology, the meaning of a word is represented by its distribution in utterances, word forms and their meaning are learned by minimizing prediction errors, and fully connected networks successfully capture language learning. In this article we model comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verb forms in the Discriminative Lexicon model. Kinyarwanda is a highly inflectional language, and therefore particularly interesting, because its paradigms are almost unlimited in size. Can knowledge of its enormous paradigms be modeled only on the basis of words? To answer this question we modeled a data set of 11,528 verb forms, hand-annotated for meaning and their grammatical functions, in the Linear Discriminative Learning (LDL), a two-layered, fully connected computational implementation of the Discriminative Lexicon model. We also extracted 573 verbs from our data set for which meanings are available that are based on empirical word embeddings obtained from large text corpora, and modeled them in LDL. Both comprehension and production is learned accurately: Kinyarwanda verb forms can be comprehended and produced relying on words as cognitive units, in a two-layered network, in which prediction errors are minimized.

A Study on Mobile Terminal-Based Deep Learning of English Vocabulary from a Multimodal Perspective

Within the cognitive theory of multimedia learning framework, this study explores the practical path to realize the deep learning of mobile terminal-based English vocabulary. It also discusses how to stimulate learners’ positive emotions to learn actively, construct a mental lexicon, and encourage learners to use high-order thinking to realize the transfer and innovation of knowledge.

Contrasting the semantic typology biases of Deaf and hearing nonsigners in their conceptualization of time and space

AbstractThe mental lexicon offers a window into the configuration of conceptual domains such as space and time, which has been labeled as concrete the former and abstract the latter in the current embodiment approach to cognition. Space has a phonological and semantic value in sign languages, but not in spoken languages. Additionally, the representation of time by spatial means is robust in oral and sign languages. This research asks if Deaf signers and hearing nonsigners have the same conceptual organization of those domains. In their respective languages, sixty-two participants made a repeated free word association task. These results showed that the studied populations have a little overlap in the associates evocated for each clue. The analysis of the preferences of the semantic relations of the pairs clue-associate showed a greater tendency of the Deaf signers to establish thematic relations. In contrast, the hearing participants indicated a bias toward taxonomic relations. The results suggest that the abstractness or concreteness of concepts may be modulated by factors associated with linguistic modalities. However, in this compared free association norms factors related to the language deprivation of Deaf, the asymmetries in the cross-modal language contact and cross-modal borrowing were not exhaustively controlled.

Correction for Sun et al., Syllables and their beginnings have a special role in the mental lexicon.

Correction for Sun et al., Syllables and their beginnings have a special role in the mental lexicon.

A Puzzle About Mental Lexicons and Semantic Relatedness

AbstractAccording to the received view in the literature on homonymy and polysemy representation, there is a difference between how polysemes and homonyms are represented in our mental lexicons. More concretely, the received view holds that whereas the meanings associated with a homonymous expression are (mentally) represented in separate lexical entries, the meanings associated with a polysemous expression are represented together in a single lexical entry. It is usually argued that this is the picture that is supported by the growing body of empirical evidence coming from psycholinguistics. Empirical studies of ambiguity processing and resolution consistently show that polysemous expressions enjoy various processing advantages compared to homonyms, and the received view is generally taken to be required in order to explain these results. The aim of this paper is not only to show that this is not the case but also, and more fundamentally, that the received view falls far short of explaining the available data to a sufficient degree. As a result, the received view is caught up in an explanatory dilemma that I dub the Continuum Puzzle. I then claim that the best way to escape this puzzle is to give up the received view’s core thesis in favor of an alternative view consistent with the empirical evidence. Reaching such an alternative will require rejecting the following pervasive but ill-motivated assumption: Differences in ambiguity processing and resolution can only be explained by there being some corresponding differences in the architecture of our mental lexicons.

DECODING OF NOUNS IN RELATION TO THE VERBAL MODALITY SOLLEN: THE SYNERGETICQUANTITATIVE APPROACH

The presented work is one of the stages of noun research within a certain verbal modality. The focus of the article lies in the study of the generating noun content in relation to the verbal modality sollen in German from the perspective of linguosynergetic scientific paradigm, which considers language as a complex dynamic system capable of self-organization and self-regulation. In this study methodologically important is the position that the synergetic law of making the least effort and conservation of speech energy is the driving factor of language development. In a synergetic sense, the author of the article draws parallels between the dictionary as a representative of the linguistic generalization of the structured amount of knowledge of the learned extraverbal reality and the mental lexicon, which is not an arbitrary accumulation of contributions, but constitutes a structured hierarchical system of such contributions. If lexical units in the synergetic sense and their meanings at the language level contain coded structured information, then in the same aspect the paper considers the implementation of the word in one of its meanings at the speech level as information decoding. The linguosynergetic format of the research proposed in this article assumes that language as a self-regulating system under the influence of external energy and information has developed a mechanism of different representations of nouns in syntactic constructions with different verbal modality in German-language fiction and press. The results obtained on the basis of the synergetic-quantitative approach are extrapolated to linguosynergetic models of self-organization of noun names according to the principle of minimization of efforts, which directs the human mental lexicon to optimal decoding of semantic volume of polysemic or monosemic nouns in relation to the verbal modality sollen in German-language fiction and press. Once again it was proved that since the closest distances in the lexical structure of a word at the linguistic level are the closest in comparison with the structures of knowledge of the human mental lexicon, the construction of noun content in modern German on the synergetic principle of conservation of speech energy and minimization of efforts is the most optimal way of directing the mental lexicon of a person to decoding the semantic scope of the closets meanings of the polysemic and unambiguous monosemic word models.

Processing of grammatical gender agreement morphemes in Polish: evidence from the Visual World Paradigm

This paper presents a psycholinguistic study of the processing of grammatical gender agreement morphemes in Polish, which has three gender categories (masculine, feminine, neuter), as well as what language-internal factors impact this processing. Results from an eye-tracking study using the Visual World Paradigm show that, during real-time language comprehension, adult monolingual speakers of Polish use cues from gender agreement on a prenominal adjective to anticipate the upcoming noun. An exploration of language-internal factors affecting this anticipatory processing finds this effect in all three genders, suggesting that encountering the relevant nominative-case agreement morpheme during language comprehension leads to automatic activation of a gender node in the mental lexicon, consistent with the literature on other languages with grammatical gender. These results hold true for the neuter agreement morpheme, despite the fact that this morpheme also instantiates default gender agreement in the language and is syncretic with the nominative plural agreement morpheme in all three genders. Further investigation finds that, while agreement morphemes for each gender prompt anticipatory processing, the reliability of a masculine agreement morpheme as a cue to gender is reduced in the presence of a neuter distractor, and vice versa. This raises questions regarding phonological proximity between the realized suffix and the suffix that would cue the distractor, with implications for the acquisition and processing of gender agreement morphology in Polish.

CHARACTERISTICS OF TEMPO AND PAUSES OF ENGLISH SERMON IN FILM DISCOURSE

The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of the temporal (tempo and pause) organization of monologue-type utterances of preaching character in English-language feature films. Since the rhetorical actions of the preacher are realized not only during the ritual church sermon from the pulpit, but also involve situational speeches outside the temple and private conversations with parishioners on spiritual topics, the article examines the temporal organization of these three types of speech activity of the preacher, since they are a component of priest’s speech behaviour in various communicative situations. Examining the peculiarities of religious discourse from the point of view of pragmasemantics made it possible to focus on the basic concept of this special discourse — the concept of “faith”, since it is not only a unit of the mental lexicon, but also that spiritual support that reflects the peculiarities of the spiritual mentality of a religious person. The research material, consisting of oral English-language sermons, speeches, and conversations extracted from five contemporary English-language feature films, was subjected to perceptual, auditory, and instrumental analysis. A complex auditory and instrumental analysis of the temporal characteristics of preachers’ speech allows us to conclude that there is a correlation between changes in the rate of the preacher’s speech and his assessment of the communicative and pragmatic value of his speech. A separate study of the functioning of pauses of various types (structural, rhetorical, and hesitation pauses) in the studied speech material proved the great pragmatic potential of this intonation parameter in fulfilling the communicative task of oral religious discourse.

The Mechanism of Work of The Mental Lexicon Under the Lights of The Computer System

The Mechanism of Work of The Mental Lexicon Under the Lights of The Computer System

К ВОПРОСУ КВАНТОВОЙ ТЕОРИИ ФИЗИКИ МОЗГА И ТЕОРИИ КВАНТОВО-ПОДОБНОГО СОЗНАНИЯ (ОБЗОР ЗАРУБЕЖНОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ)

The article provides a review of foreign scientific literature on existing approaches in scientists' ideas about the quantum theory of brain physics and the theory of quantum-like consciousness. It is shown that in recent years, physics and psychology have made important scientific advances; the emergence of new tools has led to the development of neuroscience, which makes it possible to study the state of the brain when known mental functions are preserved or impaired. The use of mathematical methods has made it possible to develop computational models that describe the fundamental functions of the brain and implement them in technological applications. The most pressing issues of modern research in the field of mental processes of the brain, such as perception, cognition, emotions, consciousness and learning, researchers call the problems of the universal properties of human behavior in various conditions and cultures; the potential of computational psychiatry to predict, understand and treat mental disorders; neural mechanisms of influence on mental content at higher levels of organization of the hierarchical brain; mechanisms of the emergence of abstract ideas from sensorimotor accidents, etc. Currently, in understanding the cognitive processes of the brain, perception, understanding, cognition, mental lexicon, understanding the generation and nature of emotions, memory, learning, etc. A number of researchers use the theory of quantum or quantum-like consciousness. Research in this area is both empirical and theoretical in nature, with the postulates of the theory being considered mainly related to quantum physics due to the lack of other areas in which quantum-like properties are supposedly manifested. It is believed that despite modern advances in artificial intelligence models, neural networks cannot reach the level of the human brain, partly due to differences in the way information is encoded and processed. In order to develop the potential of brain-based artificial intelligence, quantum neural networks are proposed that are similar to the mechanisms and phenomena in the brain. Interactions between biologically important molecules in the brain may underlie the quantum metalanguage that governs the behavior of humans and animals.

ИЗЫСКАНИЕ ОРИГИНАЛЬНОЙ МОДЕЛИ ДЛЯ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ ВЛИЯНИЯ ФАРМАКОЛОГИЧЕСКИ АКТИВНЫХ ВЕЩЕСТВ НА СКОРОСТЬ ПОТРЕБЛЕНИЯ КИСЛОРОДА ТКАНЬЮ ПРЕДСТАТЕЛЬНОЙ ЖЕЛЕЗЫ

The article provides a review of foreign scientific literature on existing approaches in scientists' ideas about the quantum theory of brain physics and the theory of quantum-like consciousness. It is shown that in recent years, physics and psychology have made important scientific advances; the emergence of new tools has led to the development of neuroscience, which makes it possible to study the state of the brain when known mental functions are preserved or impaired. The use of mathematical methods has made it possible to develop computational models that describe the fundamental functions of the brain and implement them in technological applications. The most pressing issues of modern research in the field of mental processes of the brain, such as perception, cognition, emotions, consciousness and learning, researchers call the problems of the universal properties of human behavior in various conditions and cultures; the potential of computational psychiatry to predict, understand and treat mental disorders; neural mechanisms of influence on mental content at higher levels of organization of the hierarchical brain; mechanisms of the emergence of abstract ideas from sensorimotor accidents, etc. Currently, in understanding the cognitive processes of the brain, perception, understanding, cognition, mental lexicon, understanding the generation and nature of emotions, memory, learning, etc. A number of researchers use the theory of quantum or quantum-like consciousness. Research in this area is both empirical and theoretical in nature, with the postulates of the theory being considered mainly related to quantum physics due to the lack of other areas in which quantum-like properties are supposedly manifested. It is believed that despite modern advances in artificial intelligence models, neural networks cannot reach the level of the human brain, partly due to differences in the way information is encoded and processed. In order to develop the potential of brain-based artificial intelligence, quantum neural networks are proposed that are similar to the mechanisms and phenomena in the brain. Interactions between biologically important molecules in the brain may underlie the quantum metalanguage that governs the behavior of humans and animals.

Stable organization of the early lexical-semantic network in 18- and 24-month-old preterm and full-term infants: an eye-tracker study.

An organized mental lexicon determines new information acquisition by orienting attention during language processing. Adult-like lexical-semantic knowledge organization has already been demonstrated in 24-month-olds. However, the outcomes of earlier studies have been contradictory in terms of the organizational capacities of 18-month-olds, thus our aim was to examine lexical-semantic organization in this younger age group. In prematurely born infants, audiovisual integration deficits have been found alongside disruptions in language perception. By including late preterm infants with corrected ages in our study, we aimed to test whether maturational differences influence lexical-semantic organization when vocabulary is growing rapidly. We tested 47 late preterm and full-term 18- and 24-month-old infants by means of an infant-adapted target-absent task using a slightly modified version of the original visual world paradigm for eye tracker. We found a longer fixation duration for the lexical and semantic distractors compared to the neutral pictures. Neither language proficiency nor age affected the looking time results. We found a dissociation by age between taxonomic and associative semantic relations. Maturational differences were detectable in the initial processing of taxonomic relations, as processing in the preterm group was slightly delayed and qualitatively different in the first half of the looking time. The size and composition of the expressive vocabulary differed only by age. In general, our study demonstrated a stable lexical-semantic organization between 18 and 24 months of age, regardless of maturational differences.

Contact Linguistics of Interlanguage

Different from traditional definitions of “interlanguage” and descriptions of interlanguage production, this study defines interlanguage in terms of its outstanding linguistic characteristics at the level of abstract lexical structure, including its three sublevels: lexical-conceptual structure, predicate-argument structure, and surface morphological realization patterns (Myers-Scotton and Jake 1995). Also different from most previous studies of interlanguage, this study views interlanguage or any interlanguage system as an outcome of a language-contact phenomenon. Adopting the Matrix Language Frame model (Myers-Scotton 1993[1997]) of bilingual intrasentential codeswitching in particular and contact linguistics in general, this study identifies the “matrix language” or the grammatical frame which structures interlanguage and reviews such a matrix language as a composite (Jake 1998; Wei 2009c). By adopting the Bilingual Lemma Activation model (Wei 2002, 2015, 2020), this study explores the nature and activity of the bilingual mental lexicon during interlanguage development. Accordingly, it proposes a particular approach to the nature and sources of second language learner errors or first language transfer in second language learning. It concludes that any interlanguage system must be driven by an incompletely acquired target language system in general and by an incompletely acquired target language abstract lexical structure in particular.

How trial-to-trial learning shapes mappings in the mental lexicon: Modelling lexical decision with linear discriminative learning

Trial-to-trial effects have been found in a number of studies, indicating that processing a stimulus influences responses in subsequent trials. A special case are priming effects which have been modelled successfully with error-driven learning (Marsolek, 2008), implying that participants are continuously learning during experiments. This study investigates whether trial-to-trial learning can be detected in an unprimed lexical decision experiment. We used the Discriminative Lexicon Model (DLM; Baayen et al., 2019), a model of the mental lexicon with meaning representations from distributional semantics, which models error-driven incremental learning with the Widrow-Hoff rule. We used data from the British Lexicon Project (BLP; Keuleers et al., 2012) and simulated the lexical decision experiment with the DLM on a trial-by-trial basis for each subject individually. Then, reaction times were predicted with Generalized Additive Models (GAMs), using measures derived from the DLM simulations as predictors. We extracted measures from two simulations per subject (one with learning updates between trials and one without), and used them as input to two GAMs. Learning-based models showed better model fit than the non-learning ones for the majority of subjects. Our measures also provide insights into lexical processing and individual differences. This demonstrates the potential of the DLM to model behavioural data and leads to the conclusion that trial-to-trial learning can indeed be detected in unprimed lexical decision. Our results support the possibility that our lexical knowledge is subject to continuous changes.