scholarly journals Networks in the mind – what communities reveal about the structure of the lexicon

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-199
Author(s):  
László Kovács ◽  
András Bóta ◽  
László Hajdu ◽  
Miklós Krész
Keyword(s):  
Word Association ◽  
Mental Lexicon ◽  
Association Network ◽  
Community Structures ◽  
Associative Structure ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Agglutinative Language

Abstract The mental lexicon stores words and information about words. The lexicon is seen by many researchers as a network, where lexical units are nodes and the different links between the units are connections. Based on the analysis of a word association network, in this article we show that different kinds of associative connections exist in the mental lexicon. Our analysis is based on a word association database from the agglutinative language Hungarian. We use communities – closely knit groups – of the lexicon to provide evidence for the existence and coexistence of different connections. We search for communities in the database using two different algorithms, enabling us to see the overlapping (a word belongs to multiple communities) and non-overlapping (a word belongs to only one community) community structures. Our results show that the network of the lexicon is organized by semantic, phonetic, syntactic and grammatical connections, but encyclopedic knowledge and individual experiences are also shaping the associative structure. We also show that words may be connected not just by one, but more types of connections at the same time.

scholarly journals Structure at every scale: A semantic network account of the similarities between very unrelated concepts

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon De Deyne ◽  
Danielle Navarro ◽  
Amy Perfors ◽  
Gert Storms
Keyword(s):  
Word Association ◽  
Semantic Network ◽  
Activation Mechanism ◽  
Spreading Activation ◽  
Association Network ◽  
Semantic System

Similarity plays an important role in organizing the semantic system. However, given that similarity cannot be defined on purely logical grounds, it is important to understand how people perceive similarities between different entities. Despite this, the vast majority of studies focus on measuring similarity between very closely related items. When considering concepts that are very weakly related, little is known. In this article, we present 4 experiments showing that there are reliable and systematic patterns in how people evaluate the similarities between very dissimilar entities. We present a semantic network account of these similarities showing that a spreading activation mechanism defined over a word association network naturally makes correct predictions about weak similarities, whereas, though simpler, models based on direct neighbors between word pairs derived using the same network cannot.

scholarly journals “Word Association”—A Snap Shot of What Is in the Mind

2017 ◽  
Vol 01 (01) ◽  
pp. 065-066
Author(s):  
Shyamkumar Keshava ◽  
George Chiramel ◽  
Pushpinder Khera
Keyword(s):  
Word Association ◽  
The Mind

scholarly journals Errors Made by Kurdish Speaking Community in Erbil City

2018 ◽  
Vol 226 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Assist. Prof. Widad Sabir Shakir
Keyword(s):  
Mental Lexicon ◽  
Speech Errors ◽  
Community Living ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

      Obviously all speakers make errors while speaking and thus producing utterances that are different from what one intended to produce. In this paper, the researcher tries to detect some of the speech errors and their kinds. These errors are made by the Kurdish speaking community living in Erbil city and speaking different Sorani dialects. The researcher also tries to show the importance of such errors in understanding the structure of the Kurdish language and the mental lexicon and the way this knowledge is stored in the mind of the Kurdish language speaker.

scholarly journals Jean Aitchison, Words in the mind. An introduction to the mental lexicon. Blackwell, Oxford, 1987; 229 pp.

1994 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 599 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norma del Río
Keyword(s):  
Mental Lexicon ◽  
The Mind

Se reseñó el libro: Words in the mind. An introduction to the mental lexicon.

Girl – lass or curl?

2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 22.1-22.17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catrin Elisabeth Norrby ◽  
Gisela Håkansson
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Word Association ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Mental Lexicon ◽  
Association Test ◽  
Control Group ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Lexical Development ◽  
Association Tests

One of the ways to investigate the mental lexicon is to use word association tests. Empirical studies comparing associations by children and adults have indicated a tendency for children to give syntagmatic responses, whereas adults give paradigmatic responses. In order to investigate lexical development in L2 acquisition of Swedish we collected data from two groups of students, one in MalmÖ, Sweden and one in Melbourne. Part of the Melbourne group also took the association test in their L1 six months later. Native speakers were used as a control group. The results demonstrate that learners in general tend to focus more on form than content compared to native speakers. This trend was particularly strong for the L2 group in Melbourne who also exhibited more variation in their responses compared to the L2 group in Sweden and the NS control group.

scholarly journals A Study on the Way in which Words Are Organized in Iranian EFL Learners’ Mental Lexicon

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
Sedigheh Sharifi ◽  
Masoud Khalili Sabet ◽  
Abdorreza Tahriri
Keyword(s):  
Word Association ◽  
Vocabulary Learning ◽  
Mental Lexicon ◽  
Association Test ◽  
Word Knowledge ◽  
Chi Square ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Word Association Test ◽  
L1 And L2 ◽  
The Way

Vocabulary learning in both L1 and L2 is considered important to master a language. Individuals need to learn the words in order to express ideas and to communicate. As a result, research into word knowledge is important as it provides useful information considering the way in which words are learned and organized in individuals’ mind; however different studies have been conducted in this regard, there is a long way to fully understand individuals’ mental lexicon. So, word association tests are used to examine the word knowledge, to study vocabulary learning process, and how it occurs in the language learners’ mind. Similarly, the aim of this paper is to investigate the way in which words are stored and organized in Iranian EFL learners’ mental lexicon through a word association test. To this end, a word association test was designed including eight prompt words from different word classes and was administered to 50 Iranian EFL learners. They were randomly selected and included 22 males and 28 females from Razi University and an institute in Kermanshah, Iran. After administering the test, to analyze the data, learners’ responses were classified and the frequency of each classification of word association was calculated and chi-square tests were run to compare responses. Results reveal that the participants displayed different patterns in their responses as syntagmatic and paradigmatic classification. Most of them made more syntagmatic responses than paradigmatic ones. As a result, it can be concluded that more participants make mental links with syntagmatic compared to others who make links with paradigmatic and there are significant differences between male and female learners in the use of syntagmatic and paradigmatic responses; on the other hand, it appears that there is no significant differences in learners’ word association regarding age. This study has useful implications for both EFL teachers and learners by helping them understand and improve the lexical acquisition process.

scholarly journals Partial word knowledge: Frontier words in the L2 mental lexicon

2012 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 277-301
Author(s):  
Alla Zareva
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Word Association ◽  
Mental Lexicon ◽  
Word Knowledge ◽  
Partial Knowledge ◽  
Frequency Content ◽  
Association Task ◽  
Associative Behavior ◽  
Partial Word ◽  
Knowledge Scale

Abstract The study set out to examine the partial word knowledge of native speakers, L2 advanced, and intermediate learners of English with regard to four word features from Richards' (1976) taxonomy of aspects describing what knowing a word entails. To capture partial familiarity, the participants completed in writing a test containing low and mid frequency content words, accompanied by a word knowledge scale. The analysis showed that there were three distinctive patterns of partially familiar vocabulary but their distribution across the three groups was quite different, which indicated that partial knowledge was linked to different word features across the three proficiency groups. It was also of interest to explore whether the participants maintained similar associative connections for their frontier words and whether a word association task would capture partial familiarity. Overall, participants' associative domains for frontier words did not reveal any consistent associative behavior that would distinguish between proficiency groups.

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