We address the problem of how to differentiate between phonetically-caused aspects of prosody  those that arise from purely physical phonetic factors and are not reflected in the mental lexicon  vs. phonologically-maintained aspects—those that have a psychological component, i.e., arise from the representation in the mental lexicon. Two case studies are reported: the first focusing on the F0 ...

The present study endeavors to unravel the enigma of the psycholinguistic mechanisms underpinning bilingual mental lexicon by analyzing the issue of L1 lexicalization as a construct epitomizing an overarching framework. It involves 78 juniors at the Islamic Azad University, Roudehen Branch. The study inspects the impact of the interventionist/noninterventionist treatments on both sets of lexica...

Previous evidence suggests that the structure of similarity neighbourhoods in the developing mental lexicon may differ from that of the fully developed lexicon. The similarity relationships used to organize words into neighbourhoods was investigated in 20 pre-school children (age 3;7 to 5;11) using a two alternative forced-choice classification task. Children classified the similarity of test w...

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...

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...