Modalities of storage and access to complex words

This paper gives an overview of four senses of the terms "lexical (item/entity)" and "lexicon", as well as several senses of the term "lexicalization". That these terms have different senses in the literature has been discussed before, and it has been noted that this polysemy is sometimes confusing, but here I provide not only concrete definitions and succinct discussion of the relevant issues, but I also propose two new terms: INVENTORIUM (the unpredictable elements of a language) and MENTALICON (the elements that a speaker stores in memory). The latter two are crucially different because all speakers store many predictable elements.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2016

This paper deals with the impact of the salience of complex words and their constituent parts on lexical access. While almost 40 years of psycholinguistic studies have focused on the relevance of morphological structure for word recognition, little attention has been devoted to the relationship between the word as a whole unit and its constituent morphemes. Depending on the theoretical approach adopted, complex words have been seen either in the light of their paradigmatic environment (i.e., from a paradigmatic view), or in terms of their internal structure (i.e., from a syntagmatic view). These two competing views have strongly determined the choice of experimental factors manipulated in studies on morphological processing (mainly different lexical frequencies, word/non-word structure, and morphological family size). Moreover, work on various kinds of more or less segmentable items (from genuinely morphologically complex words like hunter to words exhibiting only a surface morphological structure like corner and irregular forms like thieves) has given rise to two competing hypotheses on the cognitive role of morphology. The first hypothesis claims that morphology organizes whole words into morphological families and series, while the second sets morphology at a pre-lexical level, with morphemes standing as access units to the mental lexicon. The present paper examines more deeply the notion of morphological salience and its implications for theories and models of morphological processing.

2007

In this paper we will outline some theoretical and empirical aspects of the research carried out by the Pisa research group on lexical complexity. The notion of “lexical complexity” has been investigated from a specific angle – namely, starting from the assumption that languages are complex systems within which different types of structures act as organizers in order to make it possible for cognition to handle the immense amount of information involved in the communicative process. We have put forward the hypothesis that lexical items may themselves be viewed as complex dynamical microsystems which organize conceptual material in multiple ways depending on the task at stake. Within this view, which admittedly draws inspiration from the theories of complex dynamical systems elaborated by the empirical sciences, words act at the same time as cues of mental representations, triggers of ad hoc conceptual constructions, and anchors which prevents meanings from verging on the border of ch...

A series of arguments is presented showing that words are not stored in memory in a way that resembles the abstract, phonological code used by orthography or by linguistic analysis. Words are stored in a very concrete, detailed code that includes nonlinguistic information including speaker's voice properties and other auditory details. Thus, memory for language resembles an exemplar memory and abstract descriptions (using letter-like units and speaker-invariant features) are probably computed on the fly whenever needed. One consequence of this hypothesis is that the study of phonology should be the study of generalizations across the speech of a community and that such a description will employ units (segments, syllable types, prosodic patterns, etc.) that are not, themselves, employed as units in speakers' memory for language. That is, the psychological units of language are not useful for description of linguistic generalizations and the study of linguistic generalizations are not useful for storing the language for speaker use.

Alfa: Revista de Linguística (São José do Rio Preto), 2018

Gong and Coupé (2011) present the state of the art on language complexity with regard to other complex systems. See also the discussion of linguistic complexity in Mufwene (2012). 2 We assume here, like Villava and Silvestre (2015), that the lexicon contains several kinds of lexical units, namely roots, affixes, words and lexicalised phrases.

Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure, 2001

Cognitiva, 2006

Producing connected speech involves coordinating the retrieval of various types of information: a) lexical items, b) its grammatical properties, and c) its phonological composition. In this article we explore these processes during the production of compound noun phrases (NPs) such as "the dog and the car". We report three experiments in which we investigated the scope and degree of incrementality of planning. In the first experiment, naming latencies were longer for compound NPs with semantically related items (e.g., "the dog and the horse") than for compound NPs with unrelated items. In the second experiment, the lexical frequency of the two nouns in the NP was manipulated. The results showed an effect of the frequency of the first item, but no effect of the frequency of the second. Finally, in the third experiment, naming latencies were not affected by the phonological similarity between the two nouns of the NP. These results provide evidence for the fact that the availability of the second lexical item in this type of utterance does not affect the onset of articulation. These findings, as well as other data previously reported in the literature, are discussed in relation to the issue of the coordination of the retrieval of various lexical items.

btk.ppke.hu

One of the oldest problems of linguistics is the existence of phenomena which are so basic and elementary, and thus unavoidable, in language, and still, whose proper definition, desirable in a scientific study of human communication, is hard to find. One such notorious ...

2010

In this paper we will outline some theoretical and empirical aspects of the research carried out by the Pisa research group on lexical complexity. The notion of “lexical complexity” has been investigated from a specific angle – namely, starting from the assumption that languages are complex systems within which different types of structures act as organizers in order to make it possible for cognition to handle the immense amount of information involved in the communicative process. We have put forward the hypothesis that lexical items may themselves be viewed as complex dynamical microsystems which organize conceptual material in multiple ways depending on the task at stake. Within this view, which admittedly draws inspiration from the theories of complex dynamical systems elaborated by the empirical sciences, words act at the same time as cues of mental representations, triggers of ad hoc conceptual constructions, and anchors which prevents meanings from verging on the border of ch...

Inji gwahag jag'eob, 2016

I am pleased to introduce this collection of scholarly articles focused on various issues concerning language and cognition. This edition is special in light of the fact that it bears on one of most important questions regarding the interface problems explored with respect to underlying knowledge as well as real-time interpretations. In particular, the papers published here address the theme of how speakers and hearers of various languages such as Cayuga, English, Japanese, and Korean interpret and structure morphological forms and categories in the real-time and underlying mechanisms, including bound morphemes associated with sub-syllabic units, verb modals, gender features, and numerical classifiers, on one hand, and free morphemes such as nouns and verbs, on the other. In their paper "The role of sub-syllabic units in the visual word recognition of Korean monosyllabic words: A masked priming study," Kim & Bolger (2016) report on evidence for a left-branching model of subsyllabic structure in visual word recognition in Korean using a masked priming paradigm. It was found in their study that Korean-speaking subjects preferred a left-branching body-coda sub-syllabic structure to a right branching onset-rime structure when processing monosyllabic words in written language. No preference was observed, on the other hand, for larger sub-syllabic units beyond the phoneme, this finding seemingly suggesting