Definition of Mental Lexicon in Grammar

A lexicon is a group of words in the same language. Also called thesaurus, a dictionary organizes the mental vocabulary of a language according to certain values. The lexicon of a language are groupings of words, expressions and vocabulary. The mental lexicon or lexical understanding or idea of a person is the knowledge of vocabulary by the individual. It also refers to the organization of words in an individual`s mind. Grammar in the mental lexicon contains morphological, syntactic and semantic in individual words. A word is stored with its phonological images, which are accompanied by syntactic and semantic aspects. There are different definitions of the mental lexicon. In their book The Mental Lexicon: Core Perspectives (2008), Gonia Jarema and Gary Libben “attempt” this definition: “The mental lexicon is the cognitive system that constitutes the capacity for conscious and unconscious lexical activity. However, some things in the language are so unpredictable. Some things are irregular. Consider, for example, the morpheme goose.

The fact that the Lautbach [ɡuws] (goose) refers to the great waterfowl with a long neck is not a predictable motive in English. As we saw in Chapter 1, this relationship between pronunciation and meaning is arbitrary. It`s not that the sound [ɡ] means “long neck”, [uw] means “water”, [s] means “beak”, etc.: it turns out that we use this combination of sounds to refer to this animal in English. If the connection between sound and meaning made sense, we would expect a similar sequence of sounds to be used in all languages to refer to a goose. But of course, that doesn`t happen. In Ojibwe it`s nika [nika], and in English, for example, it`s goose [wa]. Morpheme matches are irregularities in language because you just have to remember the fact that in your language community, certain sequences of sounds/signs mean certain things. These irregularities – things that can`t be predicted by the rules – are stored in your lexicon, which is part of your mental grammar or language skills. In fact, the meanings of the words are stored in both, such as socio-cultural information about usage, taboos, dialect, etc. The dictionary and the mental lexicon allow the speaker to retrieve information about the use of a vocabulary. Lexicons can usually contain the grammatical forms that an element can take. This type of information is further stored in the head, although it may not be as clearly structured as in a physical lexicon.

The dot “headscarf” is marked as a noun and verb in the Oxford Advanced Dictionary, while an average English language learner is unlikely to be able to use this element in both forms when it is first learned. The fact that it can be more widely disseminated is only discovered later, when the element is “relearned” in a different context. Information can therefore also be provided through the different forms of elements, but it is more accessible in a dictionary than in the mental lexicon. It is important to remember that even within a language community, one language user`s lexicon may not exactly match another language user`s lexicon. For example, my brother and I both speak Japanese, but there may be words he knows I don`t, and vice versa. But if I compare my Japanese lexicon to my brother`s lexicon, there is enough overlap for us to communicate with each other. As a Japanese-American person who has spoken both Japanese English and American English, I sometimes find that the meaning of certain words in my American English lexicon is specifically different from the meaning that other American English speakers have. I got funny looks from people because I called the green blue lights in Canada. Ao is usually translated as “blue” in Japanese and mostly points to the same shade as the English word blue pointe. But ao is also sometimes used to describe “green” things, including green lights, green apples, and vegetables.

For this reason, I have the impulse to call the traffic lights blue in English. It is quite possible that my lexical representation of the word blue in English is not identical to that of many Americans. It is just as possible that not all Japanese-English bilinguals have the same representation as me! Does this mean that I have the “wrong” meaning of blue stored in my head? I don`t think so. It`s just that the blue in my idiolect means a certain thing. In this chapter, we use generally certified linguistic data to draw conclusions about lexical significance at a general level. So in this manual, you won`t find me talking about how blue in English can also mean “green.” But I would like to explicitly acknowledge here that semantic variation exists, just as phonological, syntactic and morphological variation exists. For example, in this chapter, I could say, “She is very lively and well educated in Canadian English,” but it is quite possible that some people will find her malformed in her dialect or idiolect. Where semantic variations are particularly common, notes are taken – but in general, you should know that it doesn`t matter if your judgment varies and your idiolect is valid.

If you encounter semantic variations, we hope you practice your language skills and ask questions such as “How does my idiolect/dialect differ from the one described here?”, “How can the meaning vary from language to language?” and “What might this tell us about how meaning can change over time?”. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight interesting semantic patterns within and between languages, rather than describing a particular person`s lexicon or describing the meaning of a particular word. One study showed that the size of a Japanese woman`s healthy mental lexicon (called AA) of kanji decreased by about 1% per year on average between the ages of 83 and 93. This was tested by a simple naming task of 612 kanji names, once when the subject was 83 years old (1998), and then again at the age of 93 (2008). [37] This study has currently reviewed related results in the literature (as of 2010), noting that the lexical decline rate of AA was a focal point in the range of an identified rate of decline of 0.2 to 1.4% per year.