Accessing the Mental Dictionary

1
Accessing the Mental Dictionary
LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT
2
Accessing a normal dictionary

• speculum(sp?kj?l?m) n., pl. -la (-l?) or -lums.
  1. a mirror, esp. one made of polished
  metal......
• sped(sp?d) vb. a past tense and past participle
  of speed.
• speech(spit?) n. 1. the act or faculty of
  speaking.....
• speechless(spit?lIs) adj. 1. not able to speak.
  2. temporarily deprived of speech. 3. not
  expressed.......
• speed(spid) n. 1. The act or quality of acting
  or moving fast rapidity. 2. the rate......

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Some properties of lexical access

• Shadowing and word-monitoring tasks
• latencies of 250-275 msec.
• subtract 50-75 msec for response execution
• 200 msec
• before acoustic offset
• Context apparently aids recognition

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Marslen-Wilsons Cohort Model

• The mental representations of words are activated
  on the basis of bottom-up input, and can be
  de-activated by subsequent bottom-up and top-down
  input.
• Recognition point correlates with Uniqueness
  point.

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Uniqueness and Recognition

• t - tea, tree, trick, tread, tressle,
• trespass, top, tick, etc.
• tr - tree, trick, tread, tressle, trespass,
• etc.
• tre - tread, tressle, trespass, etc.
• tres - tressle, trespass, etc.
• tresp - trespass.

• phoneme monitoring latencies correlate with a
  priori cohort analysis

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The Zwitserlood experiment

• cross-modal priming

c a p t i ve
auditory prime
c a p t ai n
or
slave
visual probe
ship
shop

• priming found to both alternatives in early
  condition only
• more priming found to ship a frequency effect

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The Revised Cohort Model

• Initial activation is bottom-up
• Competitor effects between active elements leave
  one element standing out above the rest.
  Incompatible bottom-up evidence does not
  eliminate.
• The highest ranking elements are assessed in
  parallel with respect to the interpretation the
  best fit is integrated and (hence) recognized.

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The Cohort Model
elephant
energise
dog
wombat
elegant
activation
captain
time
captive
c a p t i n
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Activating spurious words

• Shillcock (1990)
• He picked up the trombone

rib

• Lexical context does not constrain spurious access

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Lexical Ambiguity

• Swinney (1979)
• The guests were concerned about the appearance of
  the hotel lobby. There were spiders, ants, and
  other insects all over the floor.
• They were not surprised to find bugs in their room

insect / radio

• Context does not constrain multiple access

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Syntactic context (I)

• Tanenhaus et al. (1979)
• John began to watch ...

look / time

• Syntactic context does not constrain multiple
  access

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Syntactic context (II)

• Shillcock Bard (1993)
• John decided that he would ...
• John decided that wood ...

plank / blank

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