An Alternative View of the Mental Lexicon

Overview

Journal Trends Cogn Sci

Date 2004 Jul 10

PMID 15242689

Citations 45

Authors

Jeffrey L Elman

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

An essential aspect of knowing language is knowing the words of that language. This knowledge is usually thought to reside in the mental lexicon, a kind of dictionary that contains information regarding a word's meaning, pronunciation, syntactic characteristics, and so on. In this article, a very different view is presented. In this view, words are understood as stimuli that operate directly on mental states. The phonological, syntactic and semantic properties of a word are revealed by the effects it has on those states.

Citing Articles

Neural Representations of Concreteness and Concrete Concepts Are Specific to the Individual.

Botch T, Finn E J Neurosci. 2024; 44(45).

PMID: 39349055 PMC: 11551891. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0288-24.2024.

Space-time mapping on the sagittal axis in congenital blindness.

Hao F, Shi L, Sun Q, Che L, Jiang Y, Huang Z Psychol Res. 2023; 88(2):338-347.

PMID: 37620731 DOI: 10.1007/s00426-023-01871-3.

Neurobiological mechanisms for language, symbols and concepts: Clues from brain-constrained deep neural networks.

Pulvermuller F Prog Neurobiol. 2023; 230:102511.

PMID: 37482195 PMC: 10518464. DOI: 10.1016/j.pneurobio.2023.102511.

A tale of two lexica: Investigating computational pressures on word representation with neural networks.

Avcu E, Hwang M, Brown K, Gow D Front Artif Intell. 2023; 6:1062230.

PMID: 37051161 PMC: 10083378. DOI: 10.3389/frai.2023.1062230.

The mental lexicon: A blueprint for the dictionaries of tomorrow?.

Zock M Front Artif Intell. 2023; 5:1027392.

PMID: 36760717 PMC: 9905442. DOI: 10.3389/frai.2022.1027392.