Components of the mental lexicon

This paper sets out to identify, in information-processing terms, the elementary functional components of the mental lexicon and their interrelations. In particular it is concerned with the independent status of lexical codes for written and spoken language, and their relations to each other and to a language-free cognitive representation. Our evidence is based on the performance of language transcoding tasks (such as reading aloud or writing to dictation) in brain-damaged adult subjects. We review evidence for the functional independence of non-linguistic, cognitive representations, and for word-specific, lexical codes in both phonological and orthographic form. The data rule out the hypothesis of a modality-free or abstract lexicon mediating communication between lexical and cognitive representations. The data also reject the dominance of phonological over orthographic codes in access to and from word meanings. We can find no satisfactory evidence for independent lexicons used in language reception and language production.

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 326-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qingqing Qu ◽  
Markus F. Damian

Author(s):  
Michael K. Tanenhaus

Recently, eye movements have become a widely used response measure for studying spoken language processing in both adults and children, in situations where participants comprehend and generate utterances about a circumscribed “Visual World” while fixation is monitored, typically using a free-view eye-tracker. Psycholinguists now use the Visual World eye-movement method to study both language production and language comprehension, in studies that run the gamut of current topics in language processing. Eye movements are a response measure of choice for addressing many classic questions about spoken language processing in psycholinguistics. This article reviews the burgeoning Visual World literature on language comprehension, highlighting some of the seminal studies and examining how the Visual World approach has contributed new insights to our understanding of spoken word recognition, parsing, reference resolution, and interactive conversation. It considers some of the methodological issues that come to the fore when psycholinguists use eye movements to examine spoken language comprehension.


1987 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 373-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Pedlow ◽  
Roger Wales

Author(s):  
Zenzi M. Griffin ◽  
Victor S. Ferreira

Author(s):  
Brenda Rapp ◽  
Markus F. Damian

Written language is unlike other language components, in that reading and spelling are evolutionarily recent skills (i.e. human inventions that entered our repertoire only a few thousand years ago and have become widespread in the global population only in the past 100 years). Whereas reading has received considerable interest in psycholinguistics, written language production has been the “neglected” language modality, even though in this age of written electronic communication via email, texting, messaging, and so on, increasing numbers of people are processing written language as much or more than spoken language. In this chapter, we review some of the central issues in the psycholinguistics of single word written language production with the goal of providing the reader with an understanding of the cognitive and neural bases of this vital component of our language expertise.


2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (51) ◽  
pp. 32779-32790
Author(s):  
Ya-Ning Chang ◽  
Matthew A. Lambon Ralph

Understanding the processes underlying normal, impaired, and recovered language performance has been a long-standing goal for cognitive and clinical neuroscience. Many verbally described hypotheses about language lateralization and recovery have been generated. However, they have not been considered within a single, unified, and implemented computational framework, and the literatures on healthy participants and patients are largely separated. These investigations also span different types of data, including behavioral results and functional MRI brain activations, which augment the challenge for any unified theory. Consequently, many key issues, apparent contradictions, and puzzles remain to be solved. We developed a neurocomputational, bilateral pathway model of spoken language production, designed to provide a unified framework to simulate different types of data from healthy participants and aphasic patients. The model encapsulates key computational principles (differential computational capacity, emergent division of labor across pathways, experience-dependent plasticity-related recovery) and provides an explanation for the bilateral yet asymmetric lateralization of language in healthy participants, chronic aphasia after left rather than right hemisphere lesions, and the basis of partial recovery in patients. The model provides a formal basis for understanding the relationship between behavioral performance and brain activation. The unified model is consistent with the degeneracy and variable neurodisplacement theories of language recovery, and adds computational insights to these hypotheses regarding the neural machinery underlying language processing and plasticity-related recovery following damage.


2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
De Maarten Vos ◽  
Stephanie Riès ◽  
Katrien Vanderperren ◽  
Bart Vanrumste ◽  
Francois-Xavier Alario ◽  
...  

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