Lexicon Organization: How are words stored

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Lexicon Organization How are words stored?

• Atomist view
• Words are stored in their full inflected form
• talk gt talk
• talked gt talked
• toothbrush gt toothbrush

• Decompositional view
• Words are generated of morphemes that are stored
  in the lexicon
• talk gt talk
• talked gt talk -ed
• toothbrush gt tooth brush

• But
• Big memory load
• Novel forms
• Lack of relatednesstalk vs talked talk vs
  mince

• But
• Irregular formstaught gt teach -ed ?
• Meaning of opaque compoundsquarterback gt
  quarter back ? Vacation ltgt vacate-tion(many
  false alarms)

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Longtin et al 2003

• -ette in French
• gaufrette little waffle - GAUFRE waffle
• baguette bread - BAGUE ring
• abricot apricot - ABRI shelter
• Different types of morphological relations
  between the target and the prime
• Experiment 1 masked visual-visual priming
• Experiment 2 Cross-modal priming task Lexical
  decision to the target

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Longtin et al 2003
Experiment 2 cross-modal priming sensitive to
morphological semantic (but not
pseudo-morphological or orthographic) overlap
between the prime and the target
facilitation
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Longtin et al 2003
Experiment 1 masked priming - 46 ms prime
target decision There is no time to access
anything but the form of the prime (i.e. the
semantics of the prime is not accessed)
facilitation
inhibition
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• Taft and Forster (1975)
• Prelexical Affix Stripping Hypothesis Words are
  decomposed into their morphological constituents
  even in the absence of semantic transparency

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Swinney (1979)

• Lexical Access during Sentence Comprehension
  (Re)Consideration of Context Effects
• How are homonym words activated/accessed from the
  mental lexicon?

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Homonyms

• Homonyms - words that have the same pronunciation
  spelling but differ in meaning
• RING
• RING1 (noun) a typically circular band of metal
  for wearing on the finger as an ornament
• RING2 (verb) to give forth a clear resonant
  sound, as a bell when struck

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Homonyms
Conceptual Level
Lemma Level
N,
V,
???
Phonological Level
???
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Homonyms
Conceptual Level
Lemma Level
N,
V,
Phonological Level
???
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Experiment 1 Stimuli

• Swinney (1979)

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Experiment 1 Results

• Swinney (1979)

0
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Experiment 2 Replication of Exp.1

• Swinney (1979)

0
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Interpretation of the results, Exp 1.

• The results of Experiment 1 provide fairly
  strong support for a model of sentential
  processing in which lexical access is an
  autonomous process because semantic facilitation
  was observed for lexical decisions to words
  related to both the contextually relevant and the
  contextually inappropriate meaning of the
  ambiguity, even in the presence of the very
  strong prior semantic contexts, it appears
  reasonable to conclude that semantic context does
  not direct lexical access. Rather, immediately
  following occurrence of an ambiguous word all
  meanings for that word seem to be momentarily
  accessed during sentence comprehension.

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• What happens after one of the meanings of an
  ambiguous word is selected?

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Experiment 2 a later position

• A single change from Experiment 1 the visual
  (lexical decision) materials appeared three
  syllables following the ambiguous (or control)
  word during the course of the sentence.