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Mental Lexicon and Lexical Organization
Research Questions
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Where do we store words?
How are they organized in our minds, and how do we recognize words that we see?
What is meaning?
How are words related to meanings?
Some Linguistic Terms and Concepts
Morphology: The study of internal structure of words; roughly speaking, the study of word
formation rules
Terms:
Morpheme: the smallest linguistic unit which has a meaning or grammatical
function. Words are composed of one or more morphemes (examples of structure of
words: sing-er-s, home-work, moon-light, un-kind-ly, talk-s, ten-th, flipp-ed, denation-al-iz-ation)
 Bound morpheme vs. Free morpheme: Bound morpheme cannot appear as a word
by itself (e.g. –s (dog-s), –ly (quick-ly), –ed (walk-ed)), while free morpheme can
appear as a word by itself; often can combine with other morphemes too (e.g. house
(house-s), walk (walk-ed), of, the, or)
 Root vs. Affix: root is a nucleus of the word that affixes attach to; affix is a
morphme that is not a root (always bound)
o prefix un-happy, pre-existing, im-possible
o suffix talk-ing, quick-ly, neighbor-hood
o infix: very rare in English (abso-bloody-lutely) very common in Arabic
 Content vs. Functional: content morphemes carry some semantic content (e.g. car,
-able, un-); functional morphemes provide grammatical information (e.g. the, and, -s
(plural), -s(3rd sg), -ing(present participle), and –ed(past participle/past tense))
Allomorphs are morphemes that have the same function but different form (e.g. impossible,
incredible, irrational)
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Basics
1. Basic unit of meaning (smaller unit of words): morpheme (decompositional view
of words)
2. Lexical storage: how words are stored in our minds in relation to each other
3. Lexical access (lexical retrieval): how we reach a word when we need it; what is
the process that enables us to retrieve lexical items when we need them?
4. Where: Semantic memory (vs. Episodic memory)
5. In what form: Lexical entries (cf. dictionary)
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A Lexical Entry (Levelt, 1997)
lemma

Meaning
Syntax
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lexeme (morphophonological form)

morphology
phonology
Organization of Words
1. Words are stored in the lexicon with connections to other words by:
a. meaning
b. form (similarities in the way they are said or the way they are written)
c. frequency of co-occurrence?
2. Association by meaning
a. sense relations: linking words through similarities and differences of
meaning:
i. synonyms: words sharing a similar meaning (though complete
synonymy is rare)
ii. opposites: words with opposed meanings of several kinds.
 binary antonyms (alive/dead)
 gradable antonyms (hot/cold)
 converses (buy/sell)
 multiply incompatible words (summer/winter)
b. semantic fields: where words are grouped according to the topic area that
they fall into: buildings, household utensils, family relationships
i. hyponym relationship (hyponyms: words that are members of the
same category)
 dog is a subordinate of animal
 animal is superordinate of dog
 Within the category ANIMAL, dog and cat are co-hyponyms
3. Association by frequency: collocates (word which frequently appear together)
i. co-ordination: cup and saucer, knife and fork
ii. co-occurrence: heavy + smoker, post + letter, door + handle
(compulsive shopper)
4. Association by sound or orthography
5. Evidence:
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a. Word association experiments: subjects usually respond with a word
associated with the stimulus in terms of meaning rather than form. This
suggests that meaning associations in the lexicon are stronger than those
based on similarity of pronunciation or spelling.
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Butterfly
moth
insect
wing(s)
bird
fly
yellow
net
pretty
flower(s)
Bug
Hungry
food
eat
thirsty
full
starved
stomach
tired
dog
pain
man
Red
white
blue
black
green
color
blood
communist
yellow
flag
bright
Salt
pepper
sugar
water
taste
sea
bitter
shaker
food
ocean
lake
b. Priming in lexical judgment (facilitation and inhibition of the recognition of a word)
i. Semantic Priming: identification of a word can be facilitated by prior
exposure to a word related in meaning
e.g. DOCTOR  NURSE vs. BUTTER  NURSE
ii. Form-based priming (or form-based priming):
e.g. CONTRAST  CONTRACT
c. Evidence from speech production
Slips of the Tongue: mistakes made by speakers who produce a wrong or non-existent
word instead of the one they intended to produce; evidence of how words are stored and
associated in the lexicon; address all types of association effect, i.e. association by form,
association by meaning, and blend
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white Anglo-Saxon prostitute (protestant)
a routine promotion (proposal)
I’ve been continuously distressed (impressed) by her
don’t take this as an erection (rejection) on my part
when were you last o the west ... east coast?
It’s at the bottom – I mean – top of the stack of books
This room is too damn hot – cold
I thought westerns were where people ride horses instead of cows (cars)
I don’t expose anyone will eat that
My data consists moanly – maistly ...
the competition is a little soughter
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didn’t bother me in the sleast ... slightest
Q: Which parts of the word seem to be kept and which replaced?
Tip of the Tongue: a state where you know that the word is in your vocabulary and can
even get a kind of mental image of it but cannot retrieve its form.
 representation of a large black beetle, used in Ancient Egypt for decoration
 large hairy elephant which lived on Earth during the early stages of human
development
 to take away something owned by somebody else, often for public use and
without payment
 an extremely small piece of mater that forms the substances of which atoms are
made
 in Greek and Roman mythology, a creature that is half man and half horse
 having leaves that fall off in autumn