The mental representation of the meaning of words.

Five phenomena concerning the meanings of words are outlined in this paper. They concern (1) our limited introspective access to the nature of lexical representations; (2) the existence of lexical entries that make accessible the sense of a word; (3) the effects of context on the interpretation of words; (4) the systematic gaps in the acquisition of lexical knowledge; and (5) the existence of different semantic types of open-class word. These phenomena are used as the basis for a psychological theory of meaning of words.