Mental Lexicon Research Articles

Linguistic paradigms as cognitive entities: A domain-general approach

Abstract The concept of paradigm has been used extensively in many areas of linguistics throughout the past century, such as language education or historical linguistics. It is therefore quite surprising that paradigms have mostly been disregarded when it comes to cognitive language theories. Recently however, more and more researchers have started to advocate for the introduction of paradigms into cognitivist frameworks to be able to account for certain phenomena in language that would be hard to explain otherwise. But whilst there is agreement on which phenomena could best be explained through the notion of paradigm, there is a lot of disagreement regarding the way in which paradigms would be mentally represented, and how they would relate to the rest of the mental lexicon. This paper will discuss a few reasons to believe that paradigms are part of our grammar, present two previously proposed examples for modelling paradigms from a cognitivist perspective, highlight possible issues regarding their psychological plausibility, and explore how further research on modelling paradigms could be aided through an alternative domain-general approach which proposes that paradigms are cognitively equivalent to non-linguistic categories.

Age-Related Diversification and Specialization in the Mental Lexicon: Comparing Aggregate and Individual-Level Network Approaches.

The mental lexicon changes across the lifespan. Prior work, aggregating data among individuals of similar ages, found that the aging lexicon, represented as a network of free associations, becomes more sparse with age: degree and clustering coefficient decrease and average shortest path length increases. However, because this work is based on aggregated data, it remains to be seen whether or not individuals show a similar pattern of age-related lexical change. Here, we demonstrate how an individual-level approach can be used to reveal differences that vary systematically with age. We also directly compare this approach with an aggregate-level approach, to show how these approaches differ. Our individual-level approach follows the logic of many past approaches by comparing individual data as they are situated within population-level data. To do this, we produce a conglomerate network from population-level data and then identify how data from individuals of different ages are situated within that network. Though we find most qualitative patterns are preserved, individuals produce associates that have a higher clustering coefficient in the conglomerate network as they age. Alongside a reduction in degree, this suggests more specialized but clustered knowledge with age. Older individuals also reveal a pattern of increasing distance among the associates they produce in response to a single cue, indicating a more diverse range of associations. We demonstrate these results for three different languages: English, Spanish, and Dutch, which all show the same qualitative patterns of differences between aggregate and individual network approaches. These results reveal how individual-level approaches can be taken with aggregate data and demonstrate new insights into understanding the aginglexicon.

Exploring the Effectiveness and Specific Teaching Methods of English Etymology in Expanding Mental Lexicon for College Students

English etymology, as a discipline that studies the origin and development of words, reveals the intrinsic connection and meaning of vocabulary by tracing the historical background, etymology and semantic evolution of words, which not only helps learners to understand the deeper meaning of vocabulary, but also expands and builds their English mental lexicon effectively, thus helping students achieve effective vocabulary enhancement in a short time. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of English etymology in the construction and expansion of mental lexicon, analyze its actual teaching methods, and demonstrate its application and effect in educational practice.

Apples, tomatoes, and health: comparison of structural characteristics of the L1 and L2 mental lexicons

Abstract The present study delves into the structure and lexical organization of L1 and L2 mental lexicons. Indirect access to the mental lexicon is provided by semantic fluency tasks, which inform researchers about how the words are organized in the mental lexicon and retrieved when necessary. Here, two groups of participants were asked to retrieve as many words of the category fruits and vegetables as possible in two minutes. The first group is made up of native speakers of Spanish who responded in Spanish L1, whereas the second group is made up of native speakers of Greek who are learning Spanish foreign language (SFL) who responded first in Spanish FL and later in Greek L1. The three sets of responses were scrutinized and compared for similarities and differences. Results point to a retrieval mechanism based on L1-mediated access for SFL learners and slightly different structures of the mental lexicon. Even in very advanced learners, lexical organization and word retrieval in the FL resembles L1 organization.

Modelling the bilingual lexicon as a multiplex phonological network.

Phonological word form networks of the mental lexicon are of psycholinguistic relevance, offering insights into the efficiency of lexical access. While much research has concentrated on first languages, there is growing evidence suggesting that phonological networks of second languages are equally significant for lexical processes. Bilingual language processing is proposed to involve the integration of first and second languages, with lexical activation spreading between similar word forms in both languages. Multiplex networks provide a framework to combine different phonological networks, allowing for the analysis of the integrated lexical system's behaviour during lexical processing. In the context of the present study, which focusses on German learners of English as a second language, a multiplex network analysis was constructed to model the interactive complexity of the bilingual mental lexicon. The study tested cross-linguistic effects in a word recognition task using English stimuli. Results revealed that during lexical processing in their second language English, German speakers also activate phonological neighbours from German. In addition, the bilinguals are attuned to the interconnectedness (i.e., clustering) of the German and English neighbours with one another in the phonological neighbourhood of the English target words. These findings can contribute to the ongoing debate on the degree of integration in the bilingual mental lexicon and shed light on the role that phonological networks can play in modelling bilingual lexical processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

EPS mid-career prize: An integrated framework for the learning, recognition and interpretation of words.

In this article, I review the evidence on the involvement of sleep and consolidation in word learning and processing during language comprehension, focusing on implications for theory. The theoretical basis for the review is a complementary systems account of word learning involving flexible (hippocampal) and stable (cortical) pathways to lexical knowledge. I argue that the accumulated data are consistent with a role for both pathways in both learning and recognition of lexical items, with sleep and consolidation supporting the transfer of recent experience between the pathways. The level of involvement of each pathway is dependent on key factors, such as consistency with prior knowledge in the case of learning, and reliance on context and/or automaticity in the case of recognition. As a consequence, the notion of a mental lexicon cannot really be restricted to just the listener's stable knowledge about words: flexible knowledge and recent experiences are also important. Furthermore, I argue that the flexible pathway plays a critical role even in the absence of new lexical items. The available evidence suggests that this pathway encodes (and potentially consolidates) recent linguistic experiences, providing potential benefits to interpretation of subsequent language and the long-term retention of knowledge. In conclusion, I propose that a dual-pathway account incorporating both flexibility and stability is necessary to explain the learning, recognition, and interpretation of words.

Impact of Disciplinary Variations on Second Language Mental Lexicon

This study investigates how academic disciplines impact second language (L2) lexical competencies. Prior L2 research has often overlooked the broader effects of disciplinary backgrounds on lexical development. To address this gap, this study utilized lexical decision, memory, and semantic fluency tasks to examine lexicon recognition, memory, and storage processes among L2 Chinese learners from various academic fields. The study participants comprised 16 students from the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) disciplines and 11 from the Science and Engineering (S&E) disciplines, all having passed HSK level 4. The tasks were conducted using E-Prime 2.0. The findings revealed distinct cognitive strategies and thinking patterns among the participants from different disciplines . These strategies and patterns affected lexical task performance in terms of accuracy and response times. Although lexical memory exhibited no significant variation among the groups, discipline-specific tendencies were observed in the formation of semantic networks. Learners from S&E disciplines preferred mastering field-relevant Chinese terminology, whereas HSS learners tended to acquire words outside their specific disciplines. This observation highlights how learners’ disciplinary backgrounds influence their vocabulary acquisition and the organization of semantic networks in L2.

A database of ambiguous Chinese characters with measures for meaning dominance and meaning balance

Abstract Chinese characters hold great potential to help inform and enrich psycholinguistic research on lexical ambiguity as a large portion of them are ambiguous in nature with meaning varying from context to context. This report presents a psycholinguistic database that contains over 2000 characters with normative measures for meaning dominance and meaning balance, that is, the relative frequency of each meaning associated with a target character and the degree of balance across the meanings of the character. The measurement process takes advantage of the fact that, in Chinese, generating words containing a target character is the most convenient way to specify and disambiguate character meanings. Character meanings stored in ordinary people’s mental lexicon are identified based on the words, along with a small portion of meaning descriptions, listed by over 900 native speakers. The measures of meaning dominance and meaning balance for the characters are derived from computing the relative frequencies of the meanings. Potential research and practical applications of the database, as a valuable tool, to enhance our understanding of the acquisition, representation, and processing of ambiguous lexical items are discussed.

Linear and nonlinear processing of Hebrew templatic words: the role of metalinguistic awareness

Abstract While universal linguistic theories advocate linear processing of words across languages, psycholinguistic research of Semitic templatic words supports the nonlinear processing into the root and template, mainly due to semantic specifications related to the root and the morphological awareness needed in the tasks. The present study examined whether the root and template affect the word processing of Hebrew native speakers due to metalinguistic awareness regardless of semantics. We designed an auditory rhyme judgment task, a phonological awareness test that requires linear processing and reduces semantics. The task included Hebrew CVCVC templatic word pairs comprising varying root and template phonemes, transposed-phoneme roots emphasizing phonological cooccurrence restrictions, and identical phoneme roots accentuating lexical-syntactic information pronounced in the vocalic melody templates. Findings revealed low accuracy rates in rhyming pairs, particularly those with accentuated linguistic information, indicating distraction from linear processing. However, the accuracy distributions among participants and between and within the stimulus types showed that linear processing also occurred. These results suggest that both linear and nonlinear processing modes are accessible to native Hebrew speakers. The study aligns with models of the mental lexicon proposing dynamic language processing influenced by both linguistic and non-linguistic factors, highlighting the idiosyncratic nature of word processing strategies.

The influence of familiarisation and item repetition on the name agreement effect in picture naming.

Name agreement (NA) refers to the degree to which speakers agree on a picture's name. A robust finding is that speakers are faster to name pictures with high agreement (HA) than those with low agreement (LA). This NA effect is thought to occur because LA pictures strongly activate several names, so speakers need time to select one. HA pictures, in contrast, strongly activate a single name, so there is no need to select one name out of several alternatives. Recent models of lexical access suggest that the structure of the mental lexicon changes with experience. Thus, speakers should consider a range of names when naming LA pictures, but the extent to which they consider each of these names should change with experience. We tested these hypotheses in two picture-naming experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were faster to name LA than HA pictures when they named each picture once. Importantly, they were faster to produce modal names (provided by most participants) than alternative names for LA pictures, consistent with the view that speakers activate multiple names for LA pictures. In Experiment 2, participants were familiarised with the modal name before the experiment and named each picture three times. Although there was still an NA effect when participants named the pictures the first time, it was reduced in comparison to Experiment 1 and was further reduced with each picture repetition. Thus, familiarisation and repetition reduced the NA effect but did not eliminate it, suggesting speakers activate a range of plausible names.

Dissociating the Effects of Visual Similarity for Brand Names and Common Words.

Abstractionist models of visual word recognition can easily accommodate the absence of visual similarity effects in misspelled common words (e.g., viotin vs. viocin) during lexical decision tasks. However, these models fail to account for the sizable effects of visual similarity observed in misspelled brand names (e.g., anazon produces longer responses and more errors than atazon). Importantly, this dissociation has only been reported in separate experiments. Thus, a crucial experiment is necessary to simultaneously examine the role of visual similarity with misspelled common words and brand names. In the current experiment, participants performed a lexical decision task using both brand names and common words. Nonword foils were created by replacing visually similar letters (e.g., anazon [baseword: amazon], anarilllo [amarillo, yellow]) or visually dissimilar letters (e.g., atazon, atarillo). Results showed sizeable visual letter similarity effects for misspelled brand names in response times and percent error. Critically, these effects were absent for misspelled common words. The pervasiveness of visual similarity effects for misspelled brand names, even in the presence of common words, challenges purely abstractionist accounts of visual word recognition. Instead, these findings support instance-based and weakly abstractionist theories, suggesting that episodic traces in the mental lexicon may retain perceptual information, particularly when words are repeatedly presented in a similar format.

Mental representation of words and concepts in late multilingualism

Abstract Speakers of multiple languages must store the respective lexical items efficiently to enable correct access. Importantly, all items must be linked to semantic information and world knowledge. One prominent model of the mental lexicon of late bilinguals is the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994), which postulates bidirectional but asymmetrical connections between separate stores for L1 (native language) and L2 (second/foreign language), and a shared conceptual store. Using German native speakers with advanced English proficiency, Experiment 1 largely confirmed model predictions regarding different preferred mental routes and processing times depending on translation direction. Moreover, the original design was extended by including abstract stimuli and picture naming in L2. A series of additional measures, such as proficiency and age of acquisition, served to specify the language experience of the participants and made it possible to compare the results with a group of non-native speakers of German (Experiment 2). Interestingly, the results suggest that the model also applies to two or more non-native languages, potentially influenced by the experimental and environmental language context.

Accessing Lexicon Versus Time Pressure: Testing Non-native Speakers of English to Perform in English Language

Storing words in memory is an interesting topic for a great number of researchers working in the fields of linguistics, applied linguistics and psycholinguistics around the globe. It is worth mentioning that the words we know are stored in a very complex way in our memory this can be pictured as the World Wide Web. Researchers have always been curious about the way this store is accessed, which in psycholinguistics is known as mental lexicon. This paper aims to explore how this network-like-store is accessed when a person is under pressure. In this study, twenty-four participants are tested in two runs of the experiment, which is used to conduct the study. On the first attempt, participants are placed in a typical scenario where there is no time constraint or any pressure to produce a certain number of words within a given amount of time. Later, they will be asked to write again in a shorter period of time and then the time is further decreased to produce written words in the third run. The effects of time constraints on the capacity to use the mental lexicon during written language production will be examined in this study. At the conclusion of the paper, the improvement of accessing mental lexicon is shown when the time pressure is increased.

Incorporating Frequency Effects in the Lexical Access of Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi.

Mandarin tone 3 sandhi refers to the phenomenon whereby a tone 3 syllable changes to a tone 2 when followed by another tone 3. This phonological process creates a deviation between the tonal forms realized at morphemic (/tone3-tone3/) and word ([tone2-tone3]) levels, posing questions in terms of how disyllabic tone 3 sandhi words are represented and accessed. The current study conducted three cross-modal lexical decision priming experiments to investigate this issue. Experiment 1 manipulated the frequencies of the initial morpheme and whole word, showing that the higher initial-character frequency against the whole word gives stronger activation to the underlying representation and the lower frequency of the initial character leads to stronger activation of the surface tone. Experiments 2 and 3 operationalized the relative frequency of the initial tone 3 morpheme's realization as a sandhi tone, finding that the competition between the two tonal realizations also influences how T3 sandhi words are accessed. Specifically, the more frequently the T3 morpheme surfaces as a T2 allomorph, the less activated the underlying representation becomes in the mental lexicon. Our results indicate a complex interplay between morpheme, word, and the associated tonal representations in the mental lexicon and that these factors co-determine the lexical access of tone 3 sandhi.

Facilitative Processing of Grammatical Gender in Heritage Speakers with Two Gender Systems

Abstract This study investigates facilitative processing of grammatical gender in heritage Spanish speakers whose dominant language is German, using eye-tracking in the Visual World Paradigm. Bilinguals with two gender systems are known to have an integrated mental lexicon with shared gender features that are co-activated during language processing and can result in interference. The present study shows that, despite observed effects of gender congruency with German, heritage speakers were able to use gender information on prenominal articles in Spanish to facilitate lexical retrieval of the target noun. This suggests that processing of gender agreement in the heritage language is resilient to competition from gender in the dominant language during real-time spoken-language comprehension. Moreover, direct comparison with previous results from heritage Spanish speakers in the USA does not show evidence that overall speed of facilitative processing in the heritage language is modulated by the presence or absence of gender in the majority language.

Transfer of affective connotations in the basic lexicon of Spanish learners of L2 English

This study addresses emotion in second languages with the aim of understanding how late bilinguals incorporate the affective connotations of core vocabulary into their mental lexicon. Specifically, it examines whether there are emotionality differences between the L2 and the native languages of reference, and whether linguistic competence, contact with the L2 and its culture, and attitudes explain the different tendencies. For this purpose, a group of Spanish learners of L2 English assessed a corpus of 300 words on the affective dimensions of valence and arousal. Different statistical analyses showed that English learners value the lexical repertoire in a very similar way to Spanish speakers, differing markedly from English speakers. It is mainly concluded that the mother tongue exerts a significant influence on this perceptual process and that the emotional connotations of the L2 are incorporated into the mental lexicon through translations from the L1 as a result of an emotional transfer.

The development of L2 collocational familiarity and its relationship with collocational frequency and congruency.

The present study took L2 English learners of different levels in China as subjects to investigate the relationship between collocational familiarity and collocational frequency as well as L1-L2 congruency, and then explored the development of the above relationship as L2 proficiency develops. The results showed that: a moderate positive correlation existed between familiarity and frequency, and the correlation increased with proficiency; a moderate positive correlation also existed between familiarity and congruency, but the correlation decreased with proficiency. Based on previous studies and the present findings, the research group infer that: low familiarity collocations tend to be represented and processed in analytic way and same-translation effect helps accelerate the semantic access of congruent collocations in this process; with the increase in learners' proficiency, collocation familiarity develops from low to high with frequency effect; high familiarity collocations tend to be represented and processed in holistic way to have direct semantic access; furthermore, learners of two levels have two kinds of collocational representation and semantic access, but low-level learners show more analytic representation and indirect semantic access because of having more low familiarity collocations in the mental lexicon.

Dialectics and Madurese Language Accent in the Perspective of Psycholinguistic and Sociolinguistic

This research aims to reveal and examine the variety of Madurese dialects found in 4 districts in Madura (Bangkalan, Sampang, Pamekasan, and Sumenep) and their factors, starting from acquisition factors to surrounding environmental factors, as well as their influence on a person's attitude patterns. The research method used is a qualitative research method with a phenomenological approach. The research subjects that will be studied are the Madurese people in general from each district. The data collection instrument used structured interviews involving 3 people from each district and sources from the literature. The data analysis technique used by researchers is qualitative descriptive. Data analysis includes data condensation, data presentation, and drawing conclusions. Based on research results, the diversity of Madurese dialects based on psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic studies is formed through the acquisition factor of Madurese language diversity in the form of vocabulary (dialect) by the human mental lexicon obtained by their social environment. Meanwhile, the diversity of the Madurese language accent is formed from various factors, including cultural, geographical, and social class factors, which influence their attitude patterns.

DECODING THE SEMANTIC VOLUME OF NOUNS WITH THE VERBAL MODALITY MÜSSEN: THE SYNERGISTIC DIMENSION OF LEAST EFFORT

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 müssen 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 müssen in German-language fiction and press. 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 (main) meanings of the polysemic and unambiguous monosemic word models.

Persian compounds in the mental lexicon

Compound words exhibit properties of both single words and phrases, raising the question of the extent to which compounds are processed as single units or as word combinations. Most studies have addressed this in Germanic languages (English, German and Dutch) which have the similar compound structure of modifier-head ordering. To see whether this limits our understanding of compound word processing and to examine compound decomposition in another language, we presented Persian stimuli auditorily in a paradigm involving typing out stimuli. We examined the effects of semantic transparency, modifier-head ordering and the potential differences between attached compounds written without spaces and those with a space between the constituents. We report the inter-keystroke-interval times, yielding letter-by-letter production of compound structures produced by 31 native speakers of Persian. Results analyzed in a linear mixed-model regression analysis suggested that, for all compounds, typing speed is slowed at the boundary between the constituents of Persian compound words. These effects, which we interpret to be evidence of morphological decomposition, were present for both semantically transparent and opaque compounds, for both head-initial and head-final compounds, and for both attached and spaced compounds. We observed greater morphological decomposition effects in semantically transparent (versus opaque) compounds. We also observed that the way transparency influences the degree of decomposition is moderated by headedness. Thus, this first report for the written production of compound words confirms previous observations of significant decomposition at morphological boundaries in English compounds, but with variation specific to Persian.