The Mental Lexicon

Meaning and the Mental Lexicon

This paper presents a network model of the mental lexicon and its formation. Models of word meaning typically postulate a network of nodes wi th connection strengths, or distances, that reflect semantic similarity, but seldom explain how the network is formed or how it could be represented in the brain. The model presented here is an attempt to address these questions. The network organizes sem...

Homonymy in the Developing Mental Lexicon

Sound Similarity Relations in the Mental Lexicon

The standard definition of neighborhood density defines two words to be neighbors if they differ by one and only one segment (Luce & Pisoni, 1998). This definition assumes that the length of the shared part is irrelevant to sound similarity. However, confusability of non-linguistic sound sequences (Fallon Coble & Robinson, 1992; Kidd & Watson, 1992) as well as judgments of sound similarity betw...

Storage and computation in the mental lexicon

In the seventies of the previous century, the mathematical properties of formal languages have provided a key source of inspiration to morphological theory. Models such as developed by Lieber (1980) and Selkirk (1984) viewed the lexicon as a calculus, a formal system combining a repository of morphemes with rules for combining these morphological atomic units into complex words. This approach t...

Using dictionaries to study the mental lexicon.

The notion of a mental lexicon has its historical roots in practical reference dictionaries. The distributional analysis of dictionaries provides one means of investigating the structure of the mental lexicon. We review our earlier work with dictionaries, based on a three-way horserace model of lexical access and production, and then present the most recent results of our ongoing analysis of th...