Metaphors and the mental lexicon.

In two experiments we investigate the possibility that lexicalization can account for the distinction between literal and metaphorical language. In both experiments, sentence contexts were presented with the final word missing. When subjects signaled they understood the context, two possible final words were presented and subjects were required to decide which was more appropriate. Semantic decision times over five different types of stimuli investigating literal and metaphorical word usage were consistent with a modified class inclusion model in which both the lexicalized meaning of words and the context in which they are presented make essential contributions to understanding.     

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 the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition on CD-ROM, which traces changes in productivity over time of the English suffixes -ment and -ity, both of which originate in French borrowings. Our results lead us to question the validity of automatic analogy from a set of existing words as the driving force behind morphological productivity.     

Neural circuitry of the bilingual mental lexicon: Effect of age of second language acquisition

Numerous studies have proposed that changes of the human language faculty caused by neural maturation can explain the substantial differences in ultimate attainment of grammatical competences between first language (L1) acquirers and second language (L2) learners. However, little evidence on the effect of neural maturation on the attainment of lexical knowledge in L2 is available. The present functional magnetic resonance study addresses this question via a cross-linguistic neural adaptation paradigm. Age of acquisition (AoA) of L2 was systematically manipulated. Concrete nouns were repeated across language (e.g., French–German, valise^suitcase–Koffer^suitcase). Whereas early bilinguals (AoA of L2 < 3 years) showed larger repetition enhancement (RE) effects in the left superior temporal gyrus, the bilateral superior frontal gyrus and the right posterior insula, late bilinguals (AoA of L2 > 10 years) showed larger RE effects in the middle portion of the left insula and in the right middle frontal gyrus (MFG). We suggest that, as for grammatical knowledge, the attainment of lexical knowledge in L2 is affected by neural maturation. The present findings lend support to neurocognitive models of bilingual word recognition postulating that, for both early and late bilinguals, the two languages are interconnected at the conceptual level.     

Cross-linguistic evidence for morphological representation in the mental lexicon.

Three types of naturally occurring data address the question of morphological structure in the lexical entry: code-switching, novel forms, and speech errors. The data were collected from a wide variety of languages, including Austro-Polynesian, Semitic, and Altaic languages, and a heretofore untapped set of affixation types, including infixes, circumfixes, multiple affixes, reduplication, and nonconcatenative morphology. The data are used to argue for a dual-listing model of lexical representation (e.g., Pinker, 1991; Frauenfelder & Schreuder, 1992) over full-listing (e.g., Butterworth, 1983) and fully parsed (e.g., Taft & Forster, 1975) models. The paper posits three morphological parameters which are activated language-specifically.     

Morphological priming in the German mental lexicon.

We present results from cross-modal priming experiments on German participles and noun plurals. The experiments produced parallel results for both inflectional systems. Regular inflection exhibits full priming whereas irregularly inflected word forms show only partial priming: after hearing regularly inflected words (-t participles and -s plurals), lexical decision times on morphologically related word forms (presented visually) were similar to reaction times for a base-line condition in which prime and target were identical, but significantly shorter than in a control condition where prime and target were unrelated. In contrast, prior presentation of irregular words (-n participles and -er plurals) led to significantly longer response times on morphologically related word forms than the prior presentation of the target itself. Hence, there are clear priming differences between regularly and irregularly inflected German words. We compare the findings on German with experimental results on regular and irregular inflection in English and Italian, and discuss theoretical implications for single versus dual-mechanism models of inflection.     

The role of prosody in the mental lexicon.

Current models of spoken word recognition take into account factors such as word frequency, word onset cohort size, and phonological neighborhood density. Using the word onset gating technique we tested word recognition when bandpass filtering was used to allow subjects to hear the full prosodic pattern of a word (number of syllables and syllabic stress), deprived of segmental information beyond that contained in the onset gate. Subjects also heard either word onsets plus duration information or only word onsets. Results suggest that word prosody is represented in the mental lexicon and is effectively used by listeners in spoken word recognition.     

Phonological abstraction in the mental lexicon

A perceptual learning experiment provides evidence that the mental lexicon cannot consist solely of detailed acoustic traces of recognition episodes. In a training lexical decision phase, listeners heard an ambiguous [f–s] fricative sound, replacing either [f] or [s] in words. In a test phase, listeners then made lexical decisions to visual targets following auditory primes. Critical materials were minimal pairs that could be a word with either [f] or [s] (cf. English knife–nice), none of which had been heard in training. Listeners interpreted the minimal pair words differently in the second phase according to the training received in the first phase. Therefore, lexically mediated retuning of phoneme perception not only influences categorical decisions about fricatives (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003), but also benefits recognition of words outside the training set. The observed generalization across words suggests that this retuning occurs prelexically. Therefore, lexical processing involves sublexical phonological abstraction, not only accumulation of acoustic episodes.     

The mental lexicon: evidence from lexical diffusion.

The purpose of this paper is to bring together evidence from studies on the lexical diffusion of various sound changes to support the following characteristics of the mental lexicon: (a) it must be connectionist rather than generative; (b) it must include information about grammatical category; (c) it must provide information on lexical frequency or entrenchment; and (d) entries must contain phonetic detail. Overall, lexical diffusion studies support a fully specified, connectionist model of the lexicon.     

Cross-language lexical connections in the mental lexicon: evidence from a case of trilingual aphasia

Despite anecdotal data on lexical interference among the languages of multilingual speakers, little research evidence about the lexical connections among multilinguals' languages exists to date. In the present paper, two experiments with a multilingual speaker who had suffered aphasia are reported. The first experiment provides data about inter-language activation during natural conversations; the second experiment examines performance on a word-translation task. Asymmetric patterns of inter-language interference and translation are evident. These patterns are influenced by age of language learning, degree of language recovery and use, and prevalence of shared lexical items. We conclude that whereas age of language learning plays a role in language recovery following aphasia, the degrees of language use prior to the aphasia onset and of shared vocabulary determine the ease with which words are accessed. The findings emphasize the importance of patterns of language use and the relations between the language pair under investigation in understanding lexical connections among languages in bilinguals and multilinguals.     

Representation in the mental lexicon: Implications for theories of the generation effect

Three experiments investigated the finding by McElroy and Slamecka (1982) that the “generation effect” (the retention advantage for self-produced over read items) is not obtained when artificial, meaningless nonwords are used as the to-be-remembered items. In Experiment 1, some subjects were asked to generate or read items that they thought were words, but, in fact, were not; no generation effect was found. In Experiment 2, subjects were taught definitions to experimenter-created items. Despite the fact that these subjects could readily retrieve each item’s assigned semantic properties, no generation effect was found. Finally, Experiment 3 examined the read]generate variable as a function of an item’s frequency of use in the language. Whereas medium- and high-frequency words produced large generation effects, no comparable effects were found for low-frequency words or nonwords. These results indicate that representation in the mental lexicon is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the generation effect. Rather, it may be necessary to consider how related the generated item is to other potential retrieval cues in the memory system.     

Common and modality-specific processes in the mental lexicon

Eight experiments were conducted to resolve: (1) empirical inconsistencies in repetition effects under intermodality conditions in word identification and lexical decision, and (2) an associated theoretical conflict concerning lexical organization. The results demonstrated that although more facilitation occurs under visual-prime/visual-test (VV) conditions than under auditory-prime/visual-test (AV) conditions, significant repetition facilitation also occurs under AV conditions. The results also indicated that: repetition effects observed for the VV and AV conditions apply to high- as well as to low-frequency words; they are insensitive to a variety of encoding tasks designed to emphasize different properties of words; and they are unaffected by differences in the ease of encoding of isolated auditory and visual words. The results are consistent with the existence of both modality-specific and common or modality-free processes in word recognition, in which word-frequency effects are restricted to the second and, by implication, lexical stage.     

Morphological units in the Arabic mental lexicon

Standard views of morphology in Modern Standard Arabic hold that surface word forms comprise at least two morphemes: a three-consonantal root conveying semantic meaning and a word pattern carrying syntactic information. An alternative account claims that semantic information is carried by a bi-consonantal morphological unit called the etymon. Accordingly, in the form [batara] the core meaning is carried not by the tri-consonantal root morpheme [btr] but by the etymon morpheme [b,t] which surfaces in other forms like [batta] "sever", [batala] "cut off" with the same meaning "cutting". Previous experimental research in Semitic languages has assumed the tri-consonantal root/word pattern approach. In cross-modal and masked priming experiments we ask whether the etymon, as a more fine-grained two-consonantal morphological unit, can yield the morphological priming effects typically obtained with tri-consonantal root morphemes. The results clearly show that two words sharing an etymon do facilitate each other both in cross-modal and masked priming even though they do not share a root, controlling for semantic and for form overlap effects. The bearing of these results on theories of morphological processing and representation is discussed.     

Evidence for frequency-based constituents in the mental lexicon: collocations involving the word of

In this paper, it is hypothesized that units larger than the traditional word, such as two-word collocations and phrases, may be stored in the mental lexicon and accessed holistically. Following previously published work on the Network or Usage-based model of lexical storage (Bybee, 1985, 1995), we suggest that the mechanism determining this constituency is the frequency with which items occur together in natural, connected speech: the collocational frequency. The present study uses a word-monitoring paradigm to investigate reaction times to the English function word of in collocations of varying levels of frequency. A significant effect of collocational frequency was observed; response latencies were longer when the target word of occurred in the very frequent collocations, indicating holistic processing of the frequent phrases. Furthermore, response latencies presented here are considerably longer than those reported in previous studies. This is explained as a result of the hypothesized holistic representation as well as a function of the use of stimuli extracted from natural conversation.     

An alternative view of the mental lexicon

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.     

Polysemy and the acquisition of the cognitive internal state lexicon

Previous research (Hall, Scholnick, & Hughes, 1987) suggested that cognitive word meanings denote six increasingly abstract and complex cognitive processes. In this paper, we further investigated two interrelated aspects of this framework. A set of 36 conversations with children aged 4:5 to 5 provided the data. In Study 1, issues related to the optimal ordering of levels were examined by comparing the original sequence with a restructured model. In Study 2, the hypothesis that, in addition toknow, other polysemous cognitive internal state words would be hierarchically organized was tested. The findings lent support to the restructured model, but rejected the hypothesis that polysemous words within the domain were characterized by equivalent,hhierarchically organized levels. We conclude by proposing that cognitive internal state words were related by complementarity of levels rather than equivalence.The research on which this paper is based was supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to William S. Hall. Data analysis was supported by the Computer Science Center at the University of Maryland, College Park.     

Broca's aphasia, verbs and the mental lexicon

Verb production is notoriously difficult for individuals with Broca's aphasia, both at the word and at the sentence level. An intriguing question is at which level in the speech production these problems arise. The aim of the present study is to identify the functional locus of the impairment that results in verb production deficits in Broca's aphasia. Levelt's (1989) model is used as a theoretical framework for this study. Two experiments have been conducted, one on verb movement and one on verbs with alternating transitivity. The results suggest that the functional impairment in Broca's aphasia should be located in Levelt's "grammatical encoder."     

The processing of lexical ambiguity: homonymy and polysemy in the mental lexicon

Under the theoretical assumption that lexical ambiguity is not a homogeneous phenomenon, but rather that it is subdivided into two distinct types, namely homonymy and polysemy, the present study investigated whether these different types of lexical ambiguity are psychologically real. Four types of ambiguous words, homonymous words (e.g., "pen"), polysemous words with metaphorical extensions (e.g., "eye"), polysemous words with a count/mass metonymic extension (e.g., "turkey"), and polysemous words with a producer/product metonymic extension (e.g., "Dali"), were used in a cross-modal sentence-priming lexical decision task. Overall, the theoretical distinction between homonymy and polysemy was reflected in the results of the present study, which revealed differential processing depending on the type of ambiguity.     

The mental representation of lexical form: a phonological approach to the recognition lexicon

We propose a psycholinguistic model of lexical processing which incorporates both process and representation. The view of lexical access and selection that we advocate claims that these processes are conducted with respect to abstract underspecified phonological representations of lexical form. The abstract form of a given item in the recognition lexicon is an integrated segmental-featural representation, where all predictable and non-distinctive information is withheld. This means that listeners do not have available to them, as they process the speech input, a representation of the surface phonetic realisation of a given word-form. What determines performance is the abstract, underspecified representation with respect to which this surface string is being interpreted. These claims were tested by studying the interpretation of the same phonological feature, vowel nasality, in two languages, English and Bengali. The underlying status of this feature differs in the two languages; nasality is distinctive only in consonants in English, while both vowels and consonants contrast in nasality in Bengali. Both languages have an assimilation process which spreads nasality from a nasal consonant to the preceding vowel. A cross-linguistic gating study was conducted to investigate whether listeners would interpret nasal and oral vowels differently in two languages. The results show that surface phonetic nasality in the vowel in VN sequences is used by English listeners to anticipate the upcoming nasal consonant. In Bengali, however, nasality is initially interpreted as an underlying nasal vowel. Bengali listeners respond to CVN stimuli with words containing a nasal vowel, until they get information about the nasal consonant. In contrast, oral vowels in both languages are unspecified for nasality and are interpreted accordingly. Listeners in both languages respond with CVN words (which have phonetic nasality on the surface) as well as with CVC words while hearing an oral vowel. The results of this cross-linguistic study support, in detail, the hypothesis that the listener's interpretation of the speech input is in terms of an abstract underspecified representation of lexical form.     

Inflectional and derivational morphology in the mental lexicon: Symmetries and asymmetries in repetition priming

Using a repetition priming paradigm, the interrelations between morphologically related words in the mental lexicon were examined in two experiments. In contrast to most previous studies, in which morphologically complex words occur as primes and stems as targets, derivationally and inflectionally complex forms were fully crossed in prime-target pairs. Experiment 1 showed asymmetries in the pattern of priming effects between different inflectional forms of German adjectives. Such asymmetries are problematic for any theory that assumes that all members of an inflectional paradigm share one entry in the mental lexicon. Experiment 2 contrasted derivational and inflectional variants of the same stems used in Experiment 1. Once again, there were same clear asymmetries in the pattern of priming effects. The implications of these results for models of lexical organization of inflectional and derivational morphology are discussed.     

On the representation of Portuguese gender-inflected words in the mental lexicon

This study aims at verifying whether Portuguese gender-inflected nouns and adjectives are represented as full forms as suggested by Spanish data (Dominguez, Cuetos, & Segui, 1999). A series of lexical decision experiments is reported. Grammatical gender, frequency dominance, and grammatical category are manipulated and cumulative frequency is controlled. The results do not provide support for a full form representation of gender-inflected words. They suggest that grammatical category, or the nature of the inflectional process involved (lexical or syntactic), affects the way words are represented and accessed. Shorter recognition latencies were obtained for nouns drawn from Feminine dominant gender-inflected pairs than from Masculine dominant pairs whereas a tendency in the opposite direction was observed in adjectives. The effect of frequency dominance appears, nevertheless, to be restricted to feminine nouns. The data are compatible with the view that masculine nouns and adjectives are represented as gender-unmarked forms. These results are discussed in relation to current dual-access models of word recognition and to the notion of "interpretability" of lexico-syntactic features, as put forward in the Minimalist Program of Generative Linguistics.