The Mental Lexicon - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2010

This paper explores meaning change, especially how listeners and readers handle polysemy, a topic which has come to the forefront of attention in recent years. It discusses in particular words for catastrophic events, which perhaps because of their dramatic content, seem to be prone to polysemy. The paper will look first at word class differences associated with the lexical item devastate, and will consider how their meanings differ. It will then evaluate the various meanings of the word disaster, looking particularly at clues which enable readers to distinguish the different senses. Finally, it looks at the newspaper language used to report an event which was widely labeled a disaster, the so-called 9/11 disaster, and considers journalists’ descriptions of the event.

The issue of compositionality is applied to the modelling of the mental lexicon in terms of neural networks as described in Fortescue (2009). The approach is illustrated by applying it to the analysis of a semantically complex verb, conquer, illustrating the need to draw upon top-down (social, stylistic) as well as bottom-up (sensory) affordances in modelling such lexical items. Thereafter, a collocation that requires the mutual adjustment of the semantics of its individual components is analysed. Finally, adjectives of temperature crucially involving “limbic” affordances are treated. In all instances, the relevance of universal conceptual “primitives” to the processes of paraphrase and (co)composition will be seen to be highly restricted.

The dual coding theoretical (DCT) approach to the mental lexicon differs radically from standard approaches to the concept in linguistics and psychology. The differences are related to a long-standing dispute concerning the nature of the mental representations that mediate perception, comprehension, and performance in cognitive tasks. The issue contrasts what have been described as common coding and multiple coding views of mental representations. The common coding view is that a single, abstract form of representation underlies language and other cognitive skills. The standard approach to the mental lexicon is in that category. The multiple coding interpretation is that mental representations are modality specific and multimodal. The DCT view of the mental lexicon is in that camp. The general theories are first summarized; subsequently, their approaches to the mental lexicon and its relation to cognition are compared.

Theories of embodied cognition consider language understanding as intimately linked to sensory and motor processes. Here we review evidence from kinematic and electrophysiological studies for the idea that processing of words referring to bodily actions, even when subliminally presented, recruits the same motor regions that are involved in motor control. We further discuss the functional role of the motor system in action word retrieval in light of neuropsychological data showing modulation of masked priming effects for action verbs in Parkinson’s patients as a function of dopaminergic treatment. Finally, a neuroimaging study revealing semantic somatotopy in the motor cortex during reading of idioms that include action words is presented. Altogether these findings provide strong arguments that semantic mechanisms are grounded in action-perception systems of the brain. They support the existence of common brain signatures to action words, even when embedded in idiomatic sentences, and motor action. They further suggest that motor schemata reflecting word meaning contribute to lexico-semantic retrieval of action words.

A long-standing debate in the science of language is whether our capacity to process language draws on attentional resources, or whether some stages or types of this processing may be automatic. I review a series of experiments in which this issue was addressed by modulating the level of attention on the auditory input while recording event-related brain activity elicited by spoken linguistic stimuli. The overall results of these studies show that the language function does possess a certain degree of automaticity, which seems to apply to different types of information. It can be explained, at least in part, by robustness of strongly connected linguistic memory circuits in the brain that can activate fully even when attentional resources are low. At the same time, this automaticity is limited to the very first stages of linguistic processing (<200 ms from the point in time when the relevant information is available in the auditory input). Later processing steps are, in turn, more affected by attention modulation. These later steps, which possibly reflect a more in-depth, secondary processing or re-analysis and repair of incoming speech, therefore appear dependant on the amount of resources allocated to language. Full processing of spoken language may thus not be possible without allocating attentional resources to it; this allocation in itself may be triggered by the early automatic stages in the first place.