XIII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2021

It is evident that the linguistic abilities of normal native speakers of a language includes,amongst other things, their knowledge of words (or the lexical items) of their language. Moreovermany scholars agree that human beings know a lot of words and they can locate them in a fractionof second. Such huge numbers and such efficiency in finding those wordsrequired, suggest that these words are carefully organized, not just stored haphazardly in the mind(Gairns, 1986) [7].

But what exactly the notion of knowledge of words means and how this mentalknowledge is represented is controversial. Scholars agree that little is actually known about themental lexicon (Aitchison, 2003) [1] and all definitions and descriptions provided to reveal itsnature are based on metaphors (Peppard, 2007)

In order to refer to such a complicated repertoire, some have likened it to a dictionary and others to the internet (Brown, 2006) [4]. However, unlike dictionary and moresimilar to the World Wide Web,the information in the mental lexicon is always being updated. 

New words are added, new connections to existing words are made and unused words may beforgotten (Aitchison, 2003)

To define mental lexicon, Bruze et al., (2009) hold that the term refers to “words thatcomprise a language” (p.363). Takac refers to Hulstijn (2000) who defines it as “amemory system in which a vast number of words, accumulated in the course of time, has beenstored, (p. 210). Bonin (2004) [3] defines mental lexicon as “the mental repository of allrepresentations that are intrinsically related to words.

Because learning a language may take place at different stages of an individual’s physical andmental growth there are still unanswered questions that have arisen with regard to how a nativelanguage learner develops the mental links within his mental lexicon for the organization of nativelanguage. However, speculations have been made as to how this knowledge isrepresented and organized in the mind.

Bonin declares that “mental lexicon contains several types of representations including phonological, semantic, morphological and orthographic”.in the same line withBonin (ibid.) notes that mental knowledge which is the place of storage of declarative knowledgecontains four kinds of features.

First, there is the specification of the item meaning. For the word toeat there is something like “to ingest for nourishment or for pleasure”. Second, there is a syntactic property including the category of the entry, for example to eat is a verb, the syntactic arguments itcan take are the external subject and internal object. Third, there is the morphological characteristicof the item ( for example, the third person for the verb ‘to go’). Fourth, there is phonologicalinformation for the entry. Learning the phonological form of a word is essential for lexical access. There are other specifications stored with an item as Randhall (2007) notes. Itmay have particular pragmatic, stylistic and affective features “that make it fit to one context ofdiscourse better than another” (p. 183).As Levelt (1995) holds, these four kinds of information are interrelated in a systematic way.Take the word painter as an example. Its meaning is related to its morphology ‘  paint’ ‘er’   and the ‘-er ’ refers to an agent in the world.

Organization of the mental lexicon

As to what this mental lexicon organization is like, different experiments have given clue asto its organization. Gairns (1986) gave some testees the definition of some words which are of lowfrequency and asked them to provide the name of the items. Not all test takers answered thequestions, but for the researchers the answers on the tip of their tongues were of great importance.Some of the answers were erroneous; however, they were phonetically close to the given words. Insome cases, some participants in the study could guess the first letter of the word or the number ofsyllables of the word and others mentioned some words which were semantically close to what wasintended by the researchers. The findings revealed that basic to lexicon and involved in itsorganization is an interrelated phonological system, a system of meaning relations and a spellingsystem which are interrelated. Other experiments (e.g. Kraut, et. al. 2002, Loftus & Loftus, 1974)[9] provided further evidence that the variable which plays a determining role in the storageand organization of items is semantics; however, apart from which variable is responsible for theorganization of mental lexis there is such a complex relationship among all variables involved in theorganization of lexis. It was such a conception that led Froster (1976, cited in Gairns ,1986) tosuggest the theory that all items are organized in one large ‘master file’ and that there are a varietyof peripheral ‘access files’ which contain information about spelling, phonology, syntax andmeaning.

Findings on storage of words in mind

Apart from the question of what the structure of mental lexicon is and what is its organization,one may ask himself in what ways the stored lexical items are interrelated. Research in memorysuggests that words are stored and remembered in a network of associations and this is agreed upon by a lot of researches (Gairns ,1986). These associations can be of many types and linked in anumber of ways.As Bruza et al. (2009) [5] suggests, “individual words are not represented in long-term memory as isolated entities but as part of a network of related words” (p. 363).

Based on Collins and  Loftus  Network Model (1975) [6], words are organized in hierarchicalnetworks and are related through nodes which have relationships such as hyponymy or super-ordination, antonymy, collocations and coordination.

Set Model Theories

The semantic feature theory suggested by Katz and Fodor (1963) [8] assumes that there is acore meaning for each word and it has a number of nonessential facts surrounding it. Katz andFodor (ibid.) proposed a list of hard-core essential meaning of a word in terms of features.Therefore, ‘unmarried, human, male and adult, can be considered as the component or features of‘real meaning’ of ‘bachelor’, that is to label a person ‘a bachelor’ each of these features isnecessary.

 Prototype Theories

Sripada explains that based on prototype theory, people have already-held-in-mind concepts and they match features of the objects they encounter with them. According toSripada (2008) “the essence of the theory of prototype is that an entry in the mental dictionary iscentered on a representation of the prototype members of the class that the word denotes”.Randall calls this a process of having some examples to categorize words. As he explains, people often make use of examples when asked to define categories.

The second language mental lexicon

How does the second language (L2) mental lexicondiffers from the first language (L1)mental lexicon? Singleton states that although the L2 mental lexicon and L1 mentallexicon are separately stored, they are connected with each other andare in communication. Wolter in line with Singleton (ibid.), argues that there is a strong influence of L1 mentallexicon on the L2 mental lexicon. Therefore it seems that two  mental lexicons exist (Bastkowski,2003) [2]. It is also held by Bastkowski (2003) that the idea of a ‘clean’ L2 mental lexicon is not probable since even if the second language learner, as he notes, may not know the second languageword, for example rain, but the concept is already in his mind. Wolter (2006) concludes that "Whatthis means for the second language learner is that a complex set of assumptions for assimilating andstructuring L2 lexical knowledge is already well in place before they learn their first word in thesecond language" (p. 742)

Conclusion

Human beings are endowed with amental lexicon which gives them theability to store andretrieve huge number of words in their memory. Different experiments have been conducted inorder to find out which factor is more responsible for the storage of the lexis in the mind anddifferent speculations have been made. It has been suggested that the mental lexicon containsseveral types of representations which have complex interrelationship with each other and differentother variables. It has also been found out that words and their properties are not separately storedin the memory but there is a network of associations which holds words together. The studies of L2lexiconhave also revealed that the L2 words are stored separately from that of the L1; however, both L1 and L2 lexicons are in communication.

References

[1] Aitchison, J. (2003). Words in the mind: an introduction to the mental lexicon. Oxford:Blackwell.

[2] Bastkowski, M. (2010). Extending the mental lexicon: The L2 mental lexicon RetrievedDecember 31, 2010, from http://www.Grin.com.

[3] Bonin, P. (2004) Mental lexicon: Some words to talk about words. New York: Nova SciencePublishers.

[4] Brown, P. S. (2006). A Small-scale exploration into the relationship between word-associationand learners’ lexical development. Unpublished master’s thesis. University of Birmingham.

[5] Bruza, P., Kitto, K., Nelson, D., & McEvoyc, C. (2009). Is there something quantum-like aboutthe human mental lexicon? Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 53, 362-377.

[6] Collins, A. M., & Loftus, E. F. (1975). A spreading activation of semantic processing. Psychological Review, 82, 6, 407-428.

[7] Gairns, R. (1986).Working with words: A guide to teaching and learning vocabulary Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[8] Katz, J. J., & Fodor, J. A. (1963).The structure of a semantic theory language, 39(2), 170-210.

[9] Kraut, M. A., Kremen, S., Segal, J. B., Calhoun, C., Moo, L. R., & Hart, J. (2002). Objectactivation from features in the semantic system. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14(1), 24-36

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