Sharon Armon-Lotem
The Mental Lexicon
The Mental Lexicon
Readings
Pastizzo, M.J. & L.B. Feldman. 2009. Multiple dimensions of relatedness among words:
Conjoint effects of form and meaning in word recognition. The Mental Lexicon. 4(1): 1–
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(Further reading can be: Carroll, D. W. 1986. Psychology of language. Monterey,
California: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company: 145-173)
“People identify words and sentences … even though phonetic segments have no clearcut boundaries, have many different pronunciations, and correspond only indirectly to
part of the speech stream itself. People hear speech as intelligible even though it is
sloppy, and they can pick up the right speech stream from a number of competing ones.”
Clark & Clark, p. 177
What is a word?
Phonological word? Orthographic word? Semantic word? Lexical word? Grammatical
word?
How are words organized?
What should be included in a dictionary?
What should be included in the lexicon as part of linguistic theory?
(1)
a. John gave a book to Mary
b. Mary received a book from John
How is the internal mental lexicon similar to/different from a dictionary?
What is the internal/mental lexicon?
The internal/mental – The representation of words in permanent memory which includes,
at least, meaning, syntactic information, relations to other words, extra-linguistic
information, pronunciation and (for adults) spelling.
What should a model of the lexicon represent and account for?
 Frequency effects
 Associations
 Relations (contrast, similarity, subordination, coordination, part-whole ….)
 Typicality (prototypes)
 Inferences (world knowledge)
 Retrieval (lexical access)
 Lexical ambiguity
Sharon Armon-Lotem
The Mental Lexicon
(2)

(3)
a. The rabbi married my sister
b. The rabbi married my brother
c. The rabbi married my sister and her boyfriend
Priming effect (e.g., Lexical decision, Semantic verification)
a. A bat is a mammal
b. A cat is a mammal
c. A bat is a bird
How is the mental lexicon organized?
How are the words stored?
How are they related to each other?
A word is a bundle of features.
A word is a part of a network.
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Hierarchical network (trees) – structural consideration: categorical relations. Each
piece of information is stored at the highest possible level for economy.
Semantic features (flowcharts + algorithms) – functional considerations: defining
features (dictionary) and characteristic features (encyclopedia).
Spreading activation (webs, networks) – Structural (e.g., categorical links) and
functional (e.g., typicality) considerations.
Extended Network Model (Bock & Levelt 1994)
(Kazanina 2006, University of Ottawa)
How are words retrieved (lexical access)?
Word frequency
Word structure
Morphological structure
Word prosody
Lexical ambiguity
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Sharon Armon-Lotem
The Mental Lexicon
Word frequency
Logogens – bundles of features (semantic, phonological, etc.)
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A word detector is activated by the presence of the sensory features of a word.
These features are counted and when it reaches the word’s threshold, the word is
recognized.
How would the logogen of apple respond to
(1) the word apple?
(2) the word banana?
(3) the word book?
Word structure
Perea, M., & Lupker, S. J. (2003). Transposed-letter confusability effects in masked form
priming. In S. Kinoshita and S. J. Lupker (Eds.), Masked priming: State of the art (pp.
97-120). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
A lexical decision task.
The target words were preceded by a very brief presentation (50msec) of another string of
letter, which is masked, and so invisible to participants: USHER is preceded by "uhser"
or "ushre".
The influence of this masked word can be shown on response times.
Morphological structure
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Are words stored as a whole unit or as its constituent elements?
Taft and Forster (1975) – Lexical decision task: Devade vs. depoch
Manelis and Tharp (1977) – sender vs. sister
Rubin at al (1979) - Under vs. unlike (50% vs. 10%)

What factors determine whether a word is stored as a whole unit rather than its
constituent element?
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Sharon Armon-Lotem
The Mental Lexicon
(Kazanina 2006, University of Ottawa)
Regular vs. irregular forms
•
Hatched – HATCH
•
Fell – FALL
•
Went - GO
Vs.
Vs.
A confluence of cues: Multiple dimensions of relatedness among words
(Pastizzo and Feldman 2009)
Swim – FLOAT (form)
Coat – FLOAT (meaning)
Boat – FLOAT (form and meaning)
Can we predict the BOAT–FLOAT facilitation from the sum of facilitation the two
dimensions of similarity?
Experimental conditions
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•
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1a - Non-masked 250 ms. Prime
1b - Non-masked 116 ms. Prime
1c - 500 ms. masked + 48 ms. Prime
(+upper case target)
Findings – Latency
•
•
•
1a – Boat>Swim>Coat=Seed
1b - Boat>Swim>Seed>Coat
1c – Boat=Swim=Seed>Coat
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Sharon Armon-Lotem
The Mental Lexicon
Cross-Model Priming
Auditory prime, visual target
Phonological priming (Marslen-Wilson & Zwiserlood 1985)
Morphological decomposition & Semantic transparency
Marslen-Wilson et al (1994): cross-modal priming
Government – govern
Apartment – apart
Government facilitates its base govern
Apartment does not facilitate its etymological base apart
Longtinet al (2003)
Gaufrette ‘little waffle’ - GAUFRE ‘waffle’
vignette ‘label’ - VIGNE ‘vineyard’
baguette ‘bread’ - BAGUE ‘ring’
abricot ‘apricot’ - ABRI ‘shelte
Word prosody (no. of syllables, stress)
Lindfield, K. C., A. Wingfield and H. Goodglass. 1999. The contribution of prosody to
spoken word recognition. Applied Psycholinguistics 20: 395-405
Word initial cohort model
Activation – Competition - Selection
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A word’s cohort is the set of items activated automatically by the initial phonemes.
Word recognition occurs when the sensory information is enough to exclude other
items in the cohort.
Spoken words are recognized long before their full duration is heard.
How does the word-onset gate technique show that word prosody must be used in
defining the lexical cohort in spoken word recognition?
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Sharon Armon-Lotem
The Mental Lexicon
Semantically related words, context and lexical ambiguity
How does a sentence influence lexical ambiguity – why don’t we carry the ambiguity?
BANK
The meeting at the bank was very romantic
The sailors tied the boat to the bank
The clerk left the money at the bank
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All meanings are accessed briefly.
The context provides cues priming one meaning over another.
The sentence provides us with top-down constraints, while sensory information and
frequency of meaning contribute to the bottom-up constraints.
Words that have a strong relationship to one of the meanings disambiguate it.
Automatic (spreading activation) vs. attentional processing (using conscious strategies).
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