Word knowledge and word usage - Representations and processes in the mental lexicon

Abstract

The final NetWordS Conference, held on the 30th and 31st of March, and 1st of April 2015 in Pisa, was convened by Prof. Pier Marco Bertinetto, Dr. Vito Pirrelli and Dr. Claudia Marzi, and brought together 91 participants (scholars, Post-Docs, PhD students) from numerous European, and some non-European, countries. A 3-day schedule involved all participants in a focused, cross-disciplinary discussion on representations and processes in the mental lexicon. People are known to understand, memorise and parse words in a context-sensitive, opportunistic way, by caching their most habitual and productive processing patterns into routinized behavioural schemes, similarly to what we observe for sequences of coordinated motor acts. Speakers, however, do not only take advantage of token-based information such as frequency of individual, holistically stored words, or episodic memories of word usage, but they are also able to organise stored word forms through abstract paradigmatic structures (or word families) whose overall size and distribution are important determinants of lexical categorisation, inference and productivity. Lexical organisation is, in fact, not necessarily functional to descriptive economy and minimisation of storage, but appears to be influenced by more dynamic, communicationoriented functions such as memorisation, prediction-based recognition and production. Lending support to this view, usage-based approaches to word processing have recently offered novel explanatory frameworks that capitalise on the stable correlation patterns between lexical representations on the one hand and process-based operations that make representations functional to communicative exchanges on the other hand. By focusing on the battery of cognitive functions supporting verbal communication (ranging from input recoding to rehearsal, access, recall and coactivation) and by exploring their psycholinguistic correlates and neuroanatomical substrates, these approaches promote a new view of language architecture as an emergent property of the interaction between language-specific input conditions and low-level, domain-specific cognitive predispositions