This paper offers a defense of Davidson’s conclusion in ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, focusing on the psychology and epistemology of language. Drawing on empirical studies in language acquisition and sociolinguistics, I problematize the traditional idealizing assumption that a person’s mental lexicon consists of two distinct parts—a dictionary, comprising her knowledge of word meanings proper, and an encyclopedia, comprising her wider knowledge of worldly affairs. I argue that the breakdown of the dictionary–encyclopedia distinction can be given a cognitive (...) and functional explanation: facts regarding language learning and the challenges of coping with linguistically diverse environments require that dictionary and encyclopedia remain deeply integrated rather than categorically distinct dimensions of the mental lexicon. This argument provides support for a psychologized version of Davidson’s conclusion in ‘Derangement’: there is no such thing as a language, in the sense that there is no diachro.. (shrink)

According to the received view in the literature on homonymy and polysemy representation, there is a difference between how polysemes and homonyms are represented in our mental lexicons. More concretely, the received view holds that whereas the meanings associated with a homonymous expression are (mentally) represented in separate lexical entries, the meanings associated with a polysemous expression are represented together in a single lexical entry. It is usually argued that this is the picture that is supported by the growing (...) body of empirical evidence coming from psycholinguistics. Empirical studies of ambiguity processing and resolution consistently show that polysemous expressions enjoy various processing advantages compared to homonyms, and the received view is generally taken to be required in order to explain these results. The aim of this paper is not only to show that this is not the case but also, and more fundamentally, that the received view falls far short of explaining the available data to a sufficient degree. As a result, the received view is caught up in an explanatory dilemma that I dub the Continuum Puzzle. I then claim that the best way to escape this puzzle is to give up the received view’s core thesis in favor of an alternative view consistent with the empirical evidence. Reaching such an alternative will require rejecting the following pervasive but ill-motivated assumption: Differences in ambiguity processing and resolution can only be explained by there being some corresponding differences in the architecture of our mental lexicons. (shrink)

An essential aspect of knowing language is knowing the words of that language. This knowledge is usually thought to reside in the mental lexicon, a kind of dictionary that contains information regarding a word’s meaning, pronunciation, syntactic characteristics, and so on. In this article, a very different view is presented. In this view, words are understood as stimuli that operate directly on mental states. The phonological, syntactic and semantic properties of a word are revealed by the effects (...) it has on those states. (shrink)

Determining optimal units of representing morphologically complex words in the mental lexicon is a central question in psycholinguistics. Here, we utilize advances in computational sciences to study human morphological processing using statistical models of morphology, particularly the unsupervised Morfessor model that works on the principle of optimization. The aim was to see what kind of model structure corresponds best to human word recognition costs for multimorphemic Finnish nouns: a model incorporating units resembling linguistically defined morphemes, a whole-word model, (...) or a model that seeks for an optimal balance between these two extremes. Our results showed that human word recognition was predicted best by a combination of two models: a model that decomposes words at some morpheme boundaries while keeping others unsegmented and a whole-word model. The results support dual-route models that assume that both decomposed and full-form representations are utilized to optimally process complex words within the mental lexicon. (shrink)

Adopting free word association test, the present study investigated the developmental features of Yi students’ Chinese mental lexicon. Eighty primary school students and 85 senior high school students in two typical Yi-Han bilingual schools in Yuexi County were recruited as the research subjects. With Yi language as their L1, all the participants started learning Chinese after entering primary school. The stimuli were 108 words selected from the 9,000 most frequently used words in modern Chinese, including 36 nouns, 36 (...) verbs, and 36 adjectives. The responses were analyzed using the framework proposed by the responses were analyzed using a three-layer framework. The results showed that the mental lexicon of Yi primary and middle school students were mainly connected with each other by meanings, with form-based connection followed. Compared with previous studies, their phonological associations accounted for a relatively higher proportion, while semantic associations were relatively weakened. Syntagmatic associations were of primary importance, with paradigmatic and encyclopedic associations followed. While syntagmatic relation was centered on determinative and governing associations, paradigmatic relation was dominated by adjacent and reverse associations. The development rate of syntagmatic associations was faster than that of paradigmatic and encyclopedic associations; no significant improvement was found on students’ adjacent, layer, homogeneous and supplement associations from primary school to high school. The findings generate important implications for Yi students’ Chinese language education. (shrink)

The experience of embarrassment was explored in two experiments comparing monolingual and bilingual speakers from cultures varying in the degree of elabo- ration of the embarrassment lexicon. In Experiment 1, narratives in English or Korean depicting three types of embarrassing predicaments were to be rated on their embarrassability and humorousness by Korean-English bilinguals, Korean monolinguals, and Euro-American monolinguals. All groups judged certain predicaments (involving social gaffes) to be the most embarrassing. However, significant group and language differences occurred in judgments (...) of the inten- sity of embarrassment and amusement judgments evoked. Euro-Americans ex- hibited higher overall levels of amusement than the two Korean groups who, in turn, reported higher levels of embarrassment, particularly for certain predica- ment types and contexts (ingroup members present). Further, for the bilinguals, inept performance predicaments in English were judged more embarrassing than those in Korean, whereas all predicament types were judged more amusing when framed with English emotion labels. Bilinguals also appeared to show a heightened embarrassability relative to both monolingual groups. Experiment 2 found lexical selection differences in open-ended responses to embarrassing predicaments depicted in each language, with Euro-Americans preferring to give justifications or use humor to minimize the embarrassment and Korean-English bilinguals preferring to give apologies or say nothing. The findings are interpret- ed to reflect the influence of culturally-mediated schemas guiding the activation and processing of emotion vocabulary. (shrink)

Follows up on Rumelhart's (1979) proposal that words don’t have meaning, but are cues to meaning (functioning as operators on our mental states, rather than operands or objects of analysis). Some of these ideas are embarrassingly old, but they seem not to have taken hold. Perhaps repetition will help." (Email from Elman to LBS 10/6/04).

Collecting human similarity judgments is instrumental to measuring and modeling neurocognitive representations and has been made more efficient by the multi-arrangement task. While this task has been tested for collecting semantic similarity judgments, it is unclear whether it also lends itself to phonological and orthographic similarity judgments of words. We have extended the task to include these lexical modalities and compared the results between modalities and against computational models. We find that similarity judgments can be collected for all three modalities, (...) although word forms were considered more difficult to sort and resulted in less consistent inter- and intra-rater agreement than semantics. For all three modalities we can construct stable group-level representational similarity matrices. However, these do not capture significant idiosyncratic similarity information unique to each participant. We discuss the potential underlying causes for differences between modalities and their effect on the application of the multi-arrangement task. (shrink)

This paper presents the hypothesis that the representational repertoire underpinning our ability to process the lexical items of a natural language can be modeled as a system of mental files. To start, I clarify the basic phenomena that an account of lexical knowledge should be able to elucidate. Then, I propose to evaluate whether the mental files theory can be brought to bear on an account of the representational format of lexical knowledge by modeling mental words as (...) recognitional files. (shrink)

We argue that the presence of a word in an utterance serves as starting point for a relevance guided inferential process that results in the construction of a contextually appropriate sense. The linguistically encoded sense of a word does not serve as its default interpretation. The cases where the contextually appropriate sense happens to be identical to this linguistic sense have no particular theoretical significance. We explore some of the consequences of this view. One of these consequences is that there (...) may be many more mentally represented concepts than there are linguistically encoded concepts. (shrink)

Elman (2009) proposed that the traditional role of the mental lexicon in language processing can largely be replaced by a theoretical model of schematic event knowledge founded on dynamic context-dependent variables. We evaluate Elman’s approach and propose an alternative view, based on dual coding theory and evidence that modality-specific cognitive representations contribute strongly to word meaning and language performance across diverse contexts which also have effects predictable from dual coding theory.

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 of much productive behavior, and that lexically specific information plays a critical and early role in the (...) interpretation of grammatical structure. But how much information can or should be placed in the lexicon? This is the question I address here. I review a set of studies whose results indicate that event knowledge plays a significant role in early stages of sentence processing and structural analysis. This poses a conundrum for traditional views of the lexicon. Either the lexicon must be expanded to include factors that do not plausibly seem to belong there; or else virtually all information about word meaning is removed, leaving the lexicon impoverished. I suggest a third alternative, which provides a way to account for lexical knowledge without a mental lexicon. (shrink)

This book explores how some word meanings are paradigmatically related to each other, for example, as opposites or synonyms, and how they relate to the mental organization of our vocabularies. Traditional approaches claim that such relationships are part of our lexical knowledge (our "dictionary" of mentally stored words) but Lynne Murphy argues that lexical relationships actually constitute our "metalinguistic" knowledge. The book draws on a century of previous research, including word association experiments, child language, and the use of synonyms (...) and antonyms in text. (shrink)

In an attempt to provide a unified model of language-related mental processes, Jackendoff puts forward significant modifications to the generative architecture of the language faculty. While sympathetic to the overall objective of the book, my review points out that one aspect of the proposal – the status of the lexicon – lacks sufficient empirical support.

A set of approximately 500 words taken from the literature on emotion was examined. The overall goal was to develop a comprehensive taxonomy of the affective lexicon, with special attention being devoted to the isolation of terms that refer to emotions. Within the taxonomy we propose, the best examples of emotion terms appear to be those that (a) refer to internal, mental conditions as opposed to physical or external ones, (b) are clear cases of stares, and (c) have (...) affect as opposed to behavior or cognition as a predominant (rather than incidental) referential focus. Relaxing one or another of these constraints yields poorer examples or nonexamples of emotions; however, this gradedness is not taken as evidence that emotions necessarily defy classical definition. (shrink)

Our study focuses on the perception of the iconicity of handshapes – one of the formational parameters of the sign in signed language. Seventy Hebrew speakers were asked to match handshapes to Hebrew translations of 45 signs, which are specified for one of the handshapes in Israeli Sign Language. The results show that participants reliably match handshapes to corresponding sign translations for highly iconic signs, but are less accurate for less iconic signs. This demonstrates that there is a notable degree (...) of iconicity in the lexicon of ISL, which is recognizable even to non-signers. The ability of non-signers to detect handshape to form is explained by the fact that word meanings are understood by both deaf and hearing peoples via the mental elaboration of simple iconic sources in which handshape meanings are grounded. The results suggest that while language external iconic mapping could ease the learning of direct iconic forms, it has a more limited capacity to help hearing non-signers learn indirect and opaque forms. The full semiotic distribution of handshapes in the lexicon and their use in language remain difficult for hearing non-signers to understand and depends on more specific language and cultural knowledge. (shrink)

Measures and theories of information abound, but there are few formalised methods for treating the contextuality that can manifest in different information systems. Quantum theory provides one possible formalism for treating information in context. This paper introduces a quantum inspired model of the human mental lexicon. This model is currently being experimentally investigated and we present a preliminary set of pilot data suggesting that concept combinations can indeed behave non-separably.

How many words—and which ones—are sufficient to define all other words? When dictionaries are analyzed as directed graphs with links from defining words to defined words, they reveal a latent structure. Recursively removing all words that are reachable by definition but that do not define any further words reduces the dictionary to a Kernel of about 10% of its size. This is still not the smallest number of words that can define all the rest. About 75% of the Kernel turns (...) out to be its Core, a “Strongly Connected Subset” of words with a definitional path to and from any pair of its words and no word's definition depending on a word outside the set. But the Core cannot define all the rest of the dictionary. The 25% of the Kernel surrounding the Core consists of small strongly connected subsets of words: the Satellites. The size of the smallest set of words that can define all the rest—the graph's “minimum feedback vertex set” or MinSet—is about 1% of the dictionary, about 15% of the Kernel, and part-Core/part-Satellite. But every dictionary has a huge number of MinSets. The Core words are learned earlier, more frequent, and less concrete than the Satellites, which are in turn learned earlier, more frequent, but more concrete than the rest of the Dictionary. In principle, only one MinSet's words would need to be grounded through the sensorimotor capacity to recognize and categorize their referents. In a dual-code sensorimotor/symbolic model of the mental lexicon, the symbolic code could do all the rest through recombinatory definition. (shrink)

Regular polysemes are sets of ambiguous words that all share the same relationship between their meanings, such as CHICKEN and LOBSTER both referring to an animal or its meat. To probe how a distributional semantic model, here exemplified by bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), represents regular polysemy, we analyzed whether its embeddings support answering sense analogy questions similar to “is the mapping between CHICKEN (as an animal) and CHICKEN (as a meat) similar to that which maps between LOBSTER (as (...) an animal) to LOBSTER (as a meat)?” We did so using the LRcos model, which combines a logistic regression classifier of different categories (e.g., animal vs. meat) with a measure of cosine similarity. We found that (a) the model was sensitive to the shared structure within a given regular relationship; (b) the shared structure varies across different regular relationships (e.g., animal/meat vs. location/organization), potentially reflective of a “regularity continuum;” (c) some high-order latent structure is shared across different regular relationships, suggestive of a similar latent structure across different types of relationships; and (d) there is a lack of evidence for the aforementioned effects being explained by meaning overlap. Lastly, we found that both components of the LRcos model made important contributions to accurate responding and that a variation of this method could yield an accuracy boost of 10% in answering sense analogy questions. These findings enrich previous theoretical work on regular polysemy with a computationally explicit theory and methods, and provide evidence for an important organizational principle for the mental lexicon and the broader conceptual knowledge system. (shrink)

The structure of the brain and the nature of evolution suggest that, despite its uniqueness, language likely depends on brain systems that also subserve other functions. The declarative / procedural model claims that the mental lexicon of memorized word- specific knowledge depends on the largely temporal-lobe substrates of declarative memory, which underlies the storage and use of knowledge of facts and events. The mental grammar, which subserves the rule-governed combination of lexical items into complex representations, depends on (...) a distinct neural system. This system, which is composed of a network of specific frontal, basal - ganglia, parietal and cerebellar structures, underlies procedural memory, which supports the learning and execution of motor and cognitive skills, especially those involving sequences. The functions of the two brain systems, together with their anatomical, physiological and biochemical substrates, lead to specific claims and predictions regarding their roles in language. These predictions are compared with those of other neurocognitive models of language. Empirical evidence is presented from neuroimaging studies of normal language processing, and from developmental and adult- onset disorders. It is argued that this evidence supports the DP model. It is additionally proposed that “ language ” disorders, such as specific language impairment and non-fluent and fluent aphasia, may be profitably viewed as impairments primarily affecting one or the other brain system. Overall, the data suggest a new neurocognitive framework for the study of lexicon and grammar. (shrink)

Formal theories of mental representation have receded from the importance they had in the early days of cognitive science. I argue that such theories are crucial in any mental domain, not just for their own sake, but to guide experimental inquiry, as well as to integrate the domain into the mind as a whole. To illustrate the criteria of adequacy for theories of mental representation, I compare two theoretical approaches to language: classical generative grammar (Chomsky, 1965, 1981, (...) 1995) and the parallel architecture (Jackendoff, 1997, 2002). The grounds for comparison include (a) the internal coherence of the theory across phonology, syntax, and semantics; (b) the relation of language to other mental faculties; (c) the relationship between grammar and lexicon; (d) relevance to theories of language processing; and (e) the possibility of languages with little or no syntax. (shrink)

In this volume, Rachel Giora explores how the salient meanings of words - the meanings that stand out as most prominent and accessible in our minds - shape how we think and how we speak. For Giora, salient meanings display interesting effects in both figurative and literal language. In both domains, speakers and writers creatively exploit the possibilities inherent in the fact that, while words have multiple meanings, some meanings are more accessible than others. Of the various meanings weencode in (...) our mental lexicon for a given word or expression, we ascribe greater cognitive priority to some over others. Interestingly, the most salient meaning is not always the literal meaning. Giora argues that it is cognitively prominent salient meanings, rather than literal meanings, that play the most important role in the comprehension and production of language. She shows that even though context begins to affect comprehension immediately, it does so without obstructing the early accessing of salient meanings. Thus, the meaning we first attend to is the salient word meaning, regardless of contextual bias. Knowledge of salient meanings turns out to play a major role, perhaps the most important role, in the process of using and understanding of language. Going beyond the familiar effects of literal meaning and context, the Graded Salience Hypothesis presents the most comprehensive explanation for how we use language for meaning. In this volume, Giora presents her new model for the first time in a book-length treatment, with original and illuminating perspectives that will be of interest to linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and all who want to know more about just how we understand what we mean. (shrink)

Humans have two kinds of beliefs, intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are a most fundamental category of cognition, defined in the architecture of the mind. They are formulated in an intuitive mental lexicon. Humans are also capable of entertaining an indefinite variety of higher-order or "reflective" propositional attitudes, many of which are of a credal sort. Reasons to hold "reflective beliefs" are provided by other beliefs that describe the source of the reflective belief as reliable, or (...) that provide explicit arguments in favour of the reflective belief. The mental lexicon of reflective beliefs includes not only intuitive, but also reflective concepts. (shrink)

The subject matter of this book is the mental lexicon, that is, the way in which the form and meaning of words is stored by speakers of specific languages. This book attempts to narrow the gap between the results of experimental neurology and the concerns of theoretical linguistics in the area of lexical semantics. The prime goal as regards linguistic theory is to show how matters of lexical organization can be analysed and discussed within a neurologically informed framework (...) that is both adaptable and constrained. It combines the perspectives of distributed network modelling and linguistic semantics, and draws upon the accruing evidence from neuroimaging studies as regards the cortical regions involved. It engages with a number of controversial current issues in both disciplines. The book is intended as a tool for linguists interested in psychological adequacy and the latest advances in cognitive science. It provides a principled means of distinguishing those semantic features required by a mental lexicon that have a direct bearing on grammar from those that do not. It will appeal to researchers in neurolinguistics and lexical semantics."--p. 4 of cover. (shrink)

Humans have two kinds of beliefs, intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are a fundamental category of cognition, defined in the architecture of the mind. They are formulated in an intuitive mental lexicon. Humans are also capable of entertaining an indefinite variety of higher‐order or‘reflective’propositional attitudes, many of which are of a credat sort. Reasons to hold reflective beliefs are provided by other beliefs that describe the source of the reflective belief as reliable, or that provide an (...) explicit argument in favour of the reflective belief. The mental lexicon of reflective beliefs includes not only intuitive, but also reflective concepts. (shrink)

Theories of language production propose that utterances are constructed by a mechanism that separates linguistic content from linguistic structure, Linguistic content is retrieved from the mental lexicon, and is then inserted into slots in linguistic structures or frames. Support for this kind of model at the phonological level comes from patterns of phonological speech errors. W present an alternative account of these patterns using a connectionist or parallel distributed proceesing (PDP) model that learns to produce sequences of phonological (...) features. The model's errors exhibit some of the properties of human speech errors, specifically, properties that have been attributed to the action of phonological rules, frames, or other structural generalizations. (shrink)