Lexical Representation And Process

Part 1 Psychological models of lexical processing: access and integration - projecting sound onto meaning, William Marslen-Wilson; visual word recognition and pronunciation - a computational model and its implications, Mark S. Seidenberg; basic issues in lexical processing, Kenneth I. Forster; lexical access in speech production, Brian Butterworth; the retrieval of phonological forms in production - test of predictions from a connectionist model, Gary S. Dell. Part 2 The nature of the input: review of selected models of speech perception, Dennis H. Klatt; connectionist approaches to acoustic phonetic processing, Jeffrey L. Elman; parafoveal preview effects and lexical access during eye fixations in reading, Keith Rayner and David A. Balota; reading and the mental lexicon - on the uptake of visual information, Derek Besner and James C. Johnston. Part 3 Lexical structure and process: understanding words and word recognition - can phonology help?, Uli H. Frauenfelder and Aditi Lahiri; auditory lexical access - where do we start?, Anne Cutler; on mental representation of morphology and its diagnosis by measures of visual access speed, Leslie Henderson; morphological parsing and the lexicon, Jorge Hankamer; psycholinguistic issues in the lexical representation of meaning, Robert Schreuder and Giovanni B. Flores D'Arcais. Part 4 Parsing and interpretation: the role of lexical representation in language comprehension, Lorraine Komisarjevsky Tyler; grammar, interpretation and processing from the lexicon, Mark J. Steedman; against lexical generation of syntax, Lyn Frazier; lexical structure and language comprehension, Michael K. Tanenhaus and Greg N. Carlson.

The 18 contributions in Lexical Representation and Process provide a coherent and well-documented frame of reference for a field of study that is becoming central to both linguistics and psycholinguistics.

This book includes the work of experts from a wide range of backgrounds who share the desire to understand how the human brain represents words. The focus of the volume is on the nature and structure of word forms and morphemes, the processes operating on the speech input to gain access to lexical representations, the modeling and acquisition of these processes, and on the neural underpinnings of lexical representation and process.

The papers in this special issue reflect the increased status on lexical representations in sentence processing research.

This volume reflects a consensus that the investigation of words in the mind offers a unique opportunity to understand both human language ability and general human cognition. It brings together key perspectives on the fundamental nature of the representation and processing of words in the mind. This thematic volume covers a wide range of views on the fundamental nature of representation and processing of words in the mind and a range of views on the investigative techniques that are most likely to reveal that nature. It provides an overview of issues and developments in the field. It uncovers the processes of word recognition. It develops new models of lexical processing.

This collection of papers and abstracts stems from the third meeting in the series of Sperlonga workshops on Cognitive Models of Speech Processing. It presents current research on the structure and organization of the mental lexicon, and on the processes that access that lexicon. The volume starts with discussion of issues in acquisition and consideration of questions such as, 'What is the relationship between vocabulary growth and the acquisition of syntax?', and, 'How does prosodic information, concerning the melodies and rhythms of the language, influence the processes of lexical and syntactic acquisition?'. From acquisition, the papers move on to consider the manner in which contemporary models of spoken word recognition and production can map onto neural models of the recognition and production processes. The issue of exactly what is recognised, and when, is dealt with next - the empirical findings suggest that the function of something to which a word refers is accessed with a different time-course to the form of that something. This has considerable implications for the nature, and content, of lexical representations. Equally important are the findings from the studies of disordered lexical processing, and two papers in this volume address the implications of these disorders for models of lexical representation and process (borrowing from both empirical data and computational modelling). The final paper explores whether neural networks can successfully model certain lexical phenomena that have elsewhere been assumed to require rule-based processes.

The main concern of this work is whether morphemes play a role in the lexical representation and processing of several types of polymorphemic words and, more particularly, at what precise representational and processing level. The book comprises two theoretical contributions and a number of empirical ones. One theoretical paper discusses several possible motivations for a morphologically organised mental lexicon (like the economy of representation view, and the efficiency of processing view), and lays out the weaknesses that are associated with some of these motivations. The other theoretical paper offers an interactive-activation reinterpretation of the findings that were originally reported within the lexical search framework. The empirical papers together cover a relatively broad array of language types and mainly deal with visual word recognition in normals in the context of lexical morphology (derived and compound words). Evidence is reported on the function of stems and affixes as processing units in prefixed and suffixed derivations. The role of semantic transparency in the lexical representation of compounds is studied, as is the effect of orthographic ambiguity on the parsing of novel compounds. The inflection-derivational distinction is approached in the context of Finnish, a highly agglutinative language with much richer morphology than the languages usually studied in psycholinguistic experiments on polymorphemic words. Two other contributions also approach the study object in the context of relatively uncharted domains: one presents data on Chinese, a language which uses a different script-type (logographic) from the languages that are usually studied (alphabetic script), and another one presents data on language production.