LING
407/507: The Mental Lexicon
The mental
lexicon can be defined as the set of meaningful units stored in the mind/brain
that are used to produce and understand language. These may include words,
morphemes, idioms, phrases, syntactic constructions, and phonaesthemes.
In this seminar we will examine the following questions:
What lexical units do people use in
perception and production and how do they interact?
How do we learn the forms and meanings of
lexical units?
Where are the boundaries of the lexicon?
Is there a distinct module called “grammar” or is it all a single
interconnected network of fundamentally similar units?
Along the way, we
will get an acquaintance with the currently dominant theoretical frameworks in
cognitive science: PDP/connectionism and Bayesian probabilistic models.
Note: This is a
seminar, so we will mostly be reading primary sources. This may be daunting for
students with little prior experience with reading journal articles. A
background in statistics and experimental design is helpful.
Textbook: Pinker,
Steven. 1999. Words and rules: The ingredients of language. New York:
Basic Books.
Note: It will not be enough to read the book. The book is only a
starting point, and much current research does not agree with the author’s
theoretical position.
Summary template
is here.
An example is here.
(This example is based on Recchia et al. 2008, available below)
Another seminar fulfilling the requirement available this term is 16106/16123 (MW 2:00-3:20, Friendly 217).
Schedule:
Week 1: Some
relevant linguistic background
Read for Wednesday: Pinker, Chapters 1-2
Week 2: The case
for words and rules
Read for Monday: Pinker, Chapters 4-5,
Read for Wednesday: Pinker, Chapter 8
Week 3.1:
Similarity and productivity
Albright, A., & B. Hayes. 2003. Rules vs. analogy in English past tenses: A
computational/experimental study Cognition, 90, 119-161. SUMMARY
507: Kapatsinski, V. 2004. Characteristics
of a rule-based default are dissociable: Evidence against the Dual Mechanism
Model. In S. Franks, F. Y. Gladney, and M. Tasseva-Kurktchieva,
eds. Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 13: The South Carolina Meeting,
136-46. Michigan Slavic Publications.
Week 3.2-4.1:
Frequency effects as evidence for units
Regularly inflected words
Baayen, R.H. 2007. Storage and computation in the mental lexicon. In G. Jarema
& G. Libben, eds. The Mental Lexicon: Core
Perspectives, 81-104. Elsevier.
507: ON BLACKBOARD
Kapatsinski, V. 2010. What is it I am writing? Lexical frequency effects
in spelling Russian prefixes: Uncertainty and competition in an apparently
regular system. Corpus
Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 6(2), 157-215.
Prefabs and phrases
ON BLACKBOARD Kapatsinski, V., & J. Radicke. 2009. Frequency and
the emergence of prefabs: Evidence from monitoring. In R. Corrigan, E. Moravcsik,
H. Ouali, & K. Wheatley, eds. Formulaic
Language. Vol. II: Acquisition, loss, psychological reality, functional
explanations, 499-520. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
SUMMARY
407: Arnon, I.,
& N. Snider. 2010. More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of Memory & Language,
62(1), 67-82. SUMMARY Presented by Holly
507: Tremblay,
A., & R. H. Baayen. 2010. Holistic Processing of Regular Four-word Sequences: A
Behavioral and ERP study of the effects of structure, frequency, and
probability on immediate free recall. In D. Wood, ed. Perspectives on Formulaic
Language: Acquisition and Communication, 151-173. London and New York:
Continuum. Presented by Paige
Project proposals (hypothesis/research question, methods) due
Week 4.2: Below
the word: morphemes and phonaesthemes
Rastle, K., M. H. Davis, & B. New. 2004. The broth in my brother’s brothel: Mortho-orthographic
segmentation in visual word recognition. Psychonomic
Bulletin & Review, 11(6), 1090-1098. SUMMARY, Presented
by Allison
507: Stockall,
L., & A. Marantz. 2006. A single route, full decomposition model of morphological
complexity: MEG evidence. The Mental Lexicon, 1(1), 85-123. Presented by Hideko
507: Bergen, B. K. 2004. The
psychological reality of phonaesthemes. Language, 80(2), 290-311. Presented by Jacob
Week 5.1: Units
in context
Dahan, D. 2010. The time course of interpretation in speech comprehension.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 121-126.
Dahan, D., & M. K. Tanenhaus.
2004. Continuous mapping from sound to meaning in
spoken-language comprehension: Immediate effects of verb-based thematic
constraints. Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 30, 498-513. SUMMARY.
Week 5.2-6.1:
Putting the units together: Modeling interactions
McClelland, J. L., D. Mirman,
& L. Holt. 2006. Are there interactive processes in speech perception? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10,
363-9.
507: McClelland, J. L., & J. L. Elman.
1986. The TRACE model of speech perception. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 1-86.
Norris, D., & J. M. McQueen. 2008. Shortlist B: A Bayesian model of continuous speech
recognition. Psychological
Review, 115, 357-95.
Week 6.2-7.1:
Neighborhoods and pathways in the lexicon
Vitevitch, M. S., P. A. Luce, D. B. Pisoni, & E. T. Auer. 1999. Phonotactics, neighborhood activation, and lexical access
for spoken words. Brain & Language, 68, 306-11. Presented by Hideko
Magnuson, J. S., M. K. Tanenhaus,
R. N. Aslin, & D. Dahan.
2003. The time course of spoken word learning and recognition:
Studies with artificial lexicons. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 132, 202-27.
(Experiments 1-2) SUMMARY,
Presented by Hideko
ON BLACKBOARD Altieri, N., T. Gruenenfelder, & D. B. Pisoni.
2010. Clustering coefficients of lexical neighborhoods: Does neighborhood
structure matter in spoken word recognition? The Mental Lexicon, 5, 1-21. SUMMARY, Presented by Wan
Beckage, N., L. B. Smith, & T. Hills. 2010. Semantic network connectivity is related to vocabulary
growth rate in children. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the
Cognitive Science Society, 2769-74. SUMMARY, Presented by Wan
507: Baayen, R.
H. 2010. The directed compound graph of English. An exploration of
lexical connectivity and its processing consequences. In S. Olson, ed. New impulses in
word-formation, 383-402. Hamburg: Buske. Presented by Holly
Week 7.2:
Interactions between lexicons: Bilinguals
Schwarz, A. I., & J. Kroll. 2007. Language processing in bilingual speakers. In M. Traxler
& M. A. Gernsbacher, eds. Handbook of
Psycholinguistics, 2nd Edition, 963-95. Amsterdam: Elsevier. (excerpts)
507: Spivey, M. J., & V. Marian. 1999. Cross
talk between native and second languages: Partial activation of an irrelevant
lexicon. Psychological
Science, 10, 281-4.
Simulation project due
Week 8: Learning
words
8.1: Forms
Aslin, R. N., J. R. Saffran,
& E. L. Newport. 1998. Computation of conditional probability statistics by
8-month-old infants.
Psychological Science, 9, 321-4. SUMMARY, Presented by Hideko
Giroux, I., & A. Rey. 2009. Lexical and sublexical units in
speech perception.
Cognitive Science, 33, 260-72. SUMMARY, Presented by Hideko
8.2: Meanings
Yu, C., & L. B. Smith. 2007. Rapid Word Learning under Uncertainty via
Cross-Situational Statistics. Psychological
Science, 18(5), 414-420.
SUMMARY, Presented by Evan
507: Chen, C., C. Yu, C.-Y. Wu, & H.
Cheung. 2009. Statistical Word Learning and Object Categorization: A
Cross-Linguistic Study in English and Mandarin. Proceedings of the 31st
Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Presented by Evan
Kirby, S., H. Cornish, & K. Smith.
2008. Cumulative cultural evolution in the
laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human
language. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 10681-6. Presented by Holly
Xu, F., & J. Tenenbaum.
2005. Word learning as Bayesian inference: Evidence from
preschoolers. Proceedings
of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. SUMMARY, Presented by Holly
Week 9: Learning
words II
9.1: Facilitating factors in word learning
Shafto, C. L., J. Geren,
& J. Snedecker. 2010. The role of maternal input on language in the absence of
genetic confounds: Vocabulary growth in internationally adopted children. Proceedings of the 32nd
Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2775-80. Presented by Wan
Vlach, H. A., & C. M. Sandhofer.
2010. Desirable difficulties in cross-situational word learning. Proceedings of the 32nd
Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2470-75. Presented by Wan
Recchia, G., B. T. Johns, & M. Jones. 2008. Context repetition benefits are dependent on context
redundancy. Proceedings
of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society,
267-72. Presented by
Wan
9.2: Competition between semantically-related
words and word learning
Zapf, J., &
L. B. Smith. 2009. Knowing more than one can say: The early regular plural.
Child Language, 36, 1145-1155. Presented by Paige
507: Finkbeiner,
M., & J. Nicol. 2003. Semantic category effects in second-language word learning. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24,
369-83. Presented by Paige
Week 10: The
grammar and the lexicon in acquisition
Pinker, Chapter 7, 9 Presented by Paige
Bates, E., & J. C. Goodman. 1997. On the inseparability of grammar and the lexicon: Evidence
from acquisition, aphasia, and real-time processing. Language & Cognitive Processes,
12, 507-84.
Alternate topic
(if we go quickly): Specificity of units