CiteULike: briordan mental-lexicon

Verb Meaning and the Lexicon

Gillian Ramchand — 2008-07-20T13:02:44-00:00

(2008)

How many grammars am I holding up? Discovering phonological differences between word classes

Adam Albright — 2008-05-22T02:56:37-00:00

(2008), pp. 1-20.

Predicting Naming Latencies with an Analogical Model

Steve Chandler — 2008-05-10T20:40:39-00:00

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

Abstract Skousen’s (1989, Analogical modeling of language, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht) Analogical Model (AM) predicts behavior such as spelling pronunciation by comparing the characteristics of a test item (a given input word) to those of individual exemplars in a data set of previously encountered items. While AM and other exemplar-based models enjoy continuing success in their ability to predict what a participant’s response to a given task will be, it does not yet include a widely tested mechanism for extending its predictions to other measures of interest in psycholinguistics such as response time (RT). This article reports the results of applying a formula derived in Estes (1959, in: Koch, Psychology: A study of a science, McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc.) for approximating “mean predicted latency” in decision tasks to the alternative responses and their associated probabilities predicted by AM. The model is tested against six sets of data from previously published naming studies.

The representation of morphologically complex words in the developing lexicon*

Jennifer Rabin — 2008-05-04T18:04:26-00:00

Journal of Child Language, Vol. 35, No. 02. (2008), pp. 453-465.

The study reported here examined the manner in which children represent morphologically complex words in the lexicon. Children in grades 1 to 5 completed a fragment completion task to assess the priming effects of morphologically related words. Both inflected and derived words (e.g. needs and needy, respectively) were more effective primes than control words (e.g. needle) that share similar orthography and phonology with the target word (e.g. need). These effects were consistent across the developmental period studied. Further, equivalent priming effects from the inflected and derived forms suggest that these word types are represented similarly in the developing lexicon.

Language and simulation in conceptual processing

Lawrence Barsalou — 2008-04-03T15:06:56-00:00

Williams syndrome

Annette Karmiloff-Smith — 2007-12-19T01:27:00-00:00

Current Biology, Vol. 17, No. 24. (18 December 2007), pp. R1035-R1036.

The iconicity of embodied meaning. Polysemy of spatial prepositions in the cognitive framework

Fieke Van der Gucht — 2007-12-17T01:39:22-00:00

Language Sciences, Vol. 29, No. 6. (November 2007), pp. 733-754.

This paper examines the concept of polysemy which serves as the basis of the `principled polysemy model' of spatial prepositions proposed by A. Tyler and V. Evans in a number of recent publications [Tyler, Andrea, Evans, Vyvyan, 2001. Reconsidering prepositional polysemy networks: The case of over. Language 77, 724-765; Tyler, Andrea, Evans, Vyvyan, 2003a. The case of over. In: Brigitte Nerlich, Zazie Todd, Vimala Herman, Clarke, David D., (Eds.), Polysemy. Flexible Patterns of Meaning in Mind and Language. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York, pp. 99-159; Tyler, Andrea, Evans, Vyvyan, 2003b. The Semantics of English Prepositions. Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning and Cognition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge]. After situating the polysemy problem in a historical context (its roots can be traced back at least to Leibniz' discussion of Locke's semantic account of particles), some merits of Tyler and Evans's model are pointed out. Tyler and Evans support a moderate polysemy view by distinguishing more carefully between an item's uses and senses than was previously done in the radical polysemy hypothesis advocated by authors working in the Brugman-Lakoff tradition. The paper then focuses on Tyler and Evans's criteria to postulate a list of 15 distinct senses of a linguistic item, viz. the preposition over. An analysis of the `covering' sense of over, which according to Tyler and Evans should be considered as a distinct sense because it cannot be pragmatically inferred, shows that Tyler and Evans's argument is not conclusive. This observation leads to the question whether the view that over is a polysemous word with a fixed number of distinct senses is valid beyond the cognitive model Tyler and Evans propose. Building on E. Coseriu, we argue, firstly, that the cognitive model in general erroneously conceives of prepositional meanings in terms of lexical rather than instrumental meanings, and that the alleged distinct senses of the preposition over Tyler and Evans postulate are in fact utterance meanings of entire phrases and clauses; this explains the still high number of distinct senses attributed to the prepositional item. Secondly, we attempt to illustrate that the main reason why a battery of senses is postulated in the first place derives from a non-linguistic criterion we term the `iconicity of embodied meaning'. This criterion prompts the linguist to accept as many distinct senses as there are prototypical common sense experiences commonly associated with (or, `reflected by') the use of a specific linguistic item in various instantiations.

Word: A Cross-linguistic Typology

2007-11-15T12:50:12-00:00

(2007)

Compound words and structure in the lexicon

Robert Fiorentino — 2007-10-17T02:09:00-00:00

Language and Cognitive Processes, Vol. 22, No. 7. (2007), pp. 1-48.

The structure of lexical entries and the status of lexical decomposition remain controversial. In the psycholinguistic literature, one aspect of this debate concerns the psychological reality of the morphological complexity difference between compound words (teacup) and single words (crescent). The present study investigates morphological decomposition in compound words using visual lexical decision with simultaneous magnetoencephalography (MEG), comparing compounds, single words, and pseudomorphemic foils. The results support an account of lexical processing which includes early decomposition of morphologically complex words into constituents. The behavioural differences suggest internally structured representations for compound words, and the early effects of constituents in the electrophysiological signal support the hypothesis of early morphological parsing. These findings add to a growing literature suggesting that the lexicon includes structured representations, consistent with previous findings supporting early morphological parsing using other tasks. The results do not favour two putative constraints, word length and lexicalisation, on early morphological-structure based computation.

LINGUISTICS: Read My Slips: Speech Errors Show How Language Is Processed

Michael Erard — 2007-09-21T09:27:39-00:00

Science, Vol. 317, No. 5845. (21 September 2007), pp. 1674-1676.

10.1126/science.317.5845.1674

Context Effects in Spoken Word Recognition of English and German by Native and Non-native Listeners

Robert Felty — 2007-10-04T11:49:51-00:00

(2007)

Spoken word recognition involves integrating acoustic/auditory information extracted from the signal with linguistic knowledge, including sentential and discourse context, as well as the frequency of the words in the signal, and the similarity of target words to other words in the mental lexicon. Recent research on visual word recognition has shown that morphology may also affect lexical access, and that the effects of morphology on lexical access may be language-specific. This study investigates the effect of morphology on spoken word recognition using two languages which share many phonological characteristics but differ in key aspects of morphological structure. Four separate experiments investigated open-set spoken word recognition in noise using English and German disyllabic words and nonwords, testing both native and non-native listeners of each language. Results from native listeners showed facilitatory effects of lexical status and lexical frequency, as well as inhibitory effects of neighborhood density, consistent with previous studies using English CVC stimuli. In addition, the results showed a processing advantage for monomorphemic words over bimorphemic words, indicating that morphology also has an influence on spoken word recognition. The processing advantage of monomorphemes was greater for native listeners of German than of English, which is taken as evidence that the morphological structure of the language plays a key role in the influence of morphology on spoken word recognition. Results from non-native listener experiments were largely consistent with the native listener results, suggesting that non-native listeners are sensitive to the same context effects as native listeners, although the size of the context effects were generally somewhat smaller for non-native listeners, suggesting that the amount of exposure to a language can also affect processing. No current models of spoken word recognition can account for all of the effects found in this study. Full storage models cannot account for effects of morphology, while morphological decomposition models cannot account for neighborhood density effects. Therefore, a revised version of the Neighborhood Activation Model (Luce & Pisoni, 1998) of spoken word recognition is proposed which posits that words are stored whole in the lexicon, and that in addition to orthographic, phonological, semantic, and frequency information, lexical entries also contain morphological information.