Structure, form, and meaning in the mental lexicon: evidence from Arabic.

Does the organization of the mental lexicon reflect the combination of abstract underlying morphemic units or the concatenation of word-level phonological units? We address these fundamental issues in Arabic, a Semitic language where every surface form is potentially analyzable into abstract morphemic units - the word pattern and the root - and where this view contrasts with stem-based approaches, chiefly driven by linguistic considerations, in which neither roots nor word patterns play independent roles in word formation and lexical representation. Five cross-modal priming experiments examine the processing of morphologically complex forms in the three major subdivisions of the Arabic lexicon - deverbal nouns, verbs, and primitive nouns. The results demonstrate that root and word pattern morphemes function as abstract cognitive entities, operating independently of semantic factors and dissociable from possible phonological confounds, while stem-based approaches consistently fail to accommodate the basic psycholinguistic properties of the Arabic mental lexicon

How visually presented brand names are represented in the mental lexicon.

Word types are represented independently within the mental lexicon. Much of the research supporting this assumption has been accomplished through studying those with neurological impairment in naming. These studies indicate that mental representations of proper nouns differ from those of common nouns: The differences might lie in the fact that proper nouns are tokens (have one meaning), whereas common nouns are types (have more than one meaning). Brand names are assumed to be another special category with representations between these two word-types, but research on these special words is not as plentiful and their status as a distinct category is not as widely received. This study investigates brand name representation in the mental lexicon to determine whether they are intermediate between proper and common nouns as demonstrated in behavioral data from word recognition experiments. The results showed that common nouns demonstrated faster reaction times and proper nouns and brand names performed similarly to each other. This behavioral data adds to the current knowledge of type versus token responses and that brand names could be similar to proper nouns, but differences are evident. Further research is needed to understand this unresolved issue.Dept. of Psychology. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .S36. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, page: 1522. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005

The Study of Iranian EFL Learners’ Mental Lexicon through Word Association Tests

AbstractThis study intended to peek into Iranian EFL learners’ metal lexicon through word association tests (WATs).  31 male and female EFL learners studying at Bonab and Marageh language institutes participated in this study. A WAT comprised of 8 English words adopted from Roux’s (2013) word list administered to the participants. The results analyzed and interpreted according to both WA conventional classification and Fitzpatrick’s framework. Within conventional classification (syntagmatic, paradigmatic, and clang), the results confirmed the syntagmatic to paradigmatic change hypothesis (S→P) only between intermediate and upper-intermediate levels. The results also indicated that low intermediate learners besides other conventional factors, associate words based on phonological and orthographical relations. Within Fitzpatrick’s framework, the results indicated that learners generally associate words according to meaning and position across all proficiency levels. However, at low-intermediate level the rate of meaning-based association overwhelms position-based association. Form-based association and erratic association drew the least attention of the participants respectively. Finally, pedagogical implication of this study along with further research idea is discussed.Key words: conventional classification, Fitzpatrick’s framework, mental lexicon, word association tes

Formative E-Assessment of Schema Acquisition in the Human Lexicon as a Tool in Adaptive Online Instruction

This chapter presents a comprehensive method of implementing e-assessment in adaptive e-instruction systems. Specifically, a neural net classifier capable of discerning whether a student has integrated new schema-related concepts from course content into her/his lexicon is used by an expert system with a database containing natural mental representations from course content obtained from students and teachers for adapting e-instruction. Mental representation modeling is used to improve student modeling. Implications for adaptive hypermedia systems and hypertext-based instructions are discussed. Furthermore, it is argued that the current research constitutes a new cognitive science empirical direction to evaluate knowledge acquisition based on meaning information

The processing difference between person names and common nouns in sentence contexts: An ERP study

Person names and common nouns differ in how they are stored in the mental lexicon. Using event-related potentials, this study compared the integration of names and nouns into sentence contexts. Both person names and common nouns were highly related in meaning and either congruent or incongruent within the previous contexts. Name incongruence elicited an N400 effect, suggesting that people were able to rapidly retrieve the semantic meaning of names from long-term memory even when this process was mediated by person identification. Conversely, participants showed a “good enough” processing of the nouns due to their low specificity level and, thus, rich semantic associations, leading to a P600 effect. These distinctive ERP effects provide clear evidence for the distinctive semantic representations of these word categories by showing that the activation of a name’s meaning is mediated by a single connection between identity-specific information and person identity, whereas multiple connections exist between nouns and their meanings

Extracting Spooky-activation-at-a-distance from Considerations of Entanglement

Following an early claim by Nelson & McEvoy \cite{Nelson:McEvoy:2007} suggesting that word associations can display `spooky action at a distance behaviour', a serious investigation of the potentially quantum nature of such associations is currently underway. This paper presents a simple quantum model of a word association system. It is shown that a quantum model of word entanglement can recover aspects of both the Spreading Activation equation and the Spooky-activation-at-a-distance equation, both of which are used to model the activation level of words in human memory.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures; To appear in Proceedings of the Third Quantum Interaction Symposium, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, vol 5494, Springer, 200