The paper discusses specificity of linguistic competence, brain imaging data, mental lexicon in language acquisition and pathology. Connectionist and modular approaches are observed in the context of origins of language and in the cognitive framework.

The mental lexicon plays a central role in reading comprehension (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). It encompasses the number of lexical entries in spoken and written language (vocabulary breadth), the semantic quality of these entries (vocabulary depth), and the connection strength between lexical representations (semantic relatedness); as such, it serves as an output for the decoding process and as ...

Background: Twitter is a popular social media where users express emotions, thoughts, and opinions that cannot be channelled in the real world. They do this by tweeting short, concise, clear messages. Since often themselves, data can detect mental health trends. Objective: This study aims to suicidal messages through tweets written with issues. Methods: These are analysed classified using lexic...

Although for many years a sharp distinction has been made in language research between rules and words—with primary interest on rules—this distinction is now blurred in many theories. If anything, the focus of attention has shifted in recent years in favor of words. Results from many different areas of language research suggest that the lexicon is representationally rich, that it is the source ...

The present study investigated the role of Chinese orthography in the organization of the mental lexicon. In the experiment, four radicals used to carry semantic information and four phonetics used to carry phonological information in pictophonetic characters were presented. Subjects were asked to generate characters that contain the given radicals or phonetics in one minute and write them down...

Language requires mindreading for entertaining communicative intentions, and mindreading in turn profits from language as a means for sharing mental states. Hence it has been hypothesised that the two skills have co-evolved. We present a Bayesian agent-based model to formalise this hypothesis. This model combines referential signalling with mental states, such that a speaker’s topic choice is p...

The representation of morphological structures in the mental lexicon constitutes the inevitable topic in the investigation of cognitive aspects of the language data processing. In the present paper the influence of the noun case functions of the phoneme identification in Croatian language is investigated within the framework of the spoken word recognition. By means of the gating paradigm 36 sub...

Words frequently acquire new senses, but the mental process that underlies the historical emergence of these senses is often opaque. Many have suggested that word meanings develop in non-arbitrary ways, but no attempt has been made to formalize these proposals and test them against historical data at scale. We propose that word meaning extension should reflect a drive towards cognitive economy....

How does the mental lexicon cope with phonetic variants in recognition of spoken words? Using a lexical decision task with and without fragment priming, the authors compared the processing of German words and pseudowords that differed only in the place of articulation of the initial consonant (place). Across both experiments, event-related brain potentials indicated that pseudowords with initia...