The Mental Lexicon - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2014

The general notion of ‘complexity’ is discussed based on foundational ideas by Herbert Simon and Nicholas Rescher. An analytic overview is provided of the ways in which language complexity has been treated in linguistic theories during the past 200 years. The Schlegel brothers, Humboldt, and Schleicher developed the first theory of complexity with their tripartition of languages into progressively complex morphological types. Humboldt also provided the principle of One Meaning – One Form (Humboldt’s Universal) which has turned out to be a widespread tendency in the simplification of morphological complexity. Jespersen’s Ease Theory has been influential in highlighting many instances of phonological change. The main contribution of Structuralism was Markedness Theory, the idea that language at all levels is built on minimal oppositions where one term (e.g. voiceless or singular) is more basic than its complex counterpart (e.g. voiced or plural). Syntactic complexity came to the fore with the theory of Immediate Constituents giving tools for measuring syntactic depth. Generative linguistics tried to measure syntactic complexity by devising Evaluation Measures based on symbol counting. Current linguistics offers a plethora of empirical studies at all levels, invoking considerations of both system, processing, and cognitive complexity.

This paper is a selective state-of-the-art report on a variety of issues related to the adoption of experimental methods to the study of syllable structure. The rationale for an experimental approach is presented in the first section, followed by a brief section on of some of the main theoretical issues involved. Section three then presents a recap of the most important empirical findings, focusing on the key factors involved, rather than the details of the specific results. Section four then presents an illustrative case where the experimental results seem to conflict, along with discussion of some of the factors that are likely responsible for this. Finally, in the last section, an appeal is made for a deeper theoretical perspective than the one that has guided research in this area heretofore.

Visual word recognition is a capital stage in reading. It involves accessing a mental representation of a written word, including processes such as perception, letter coding and selection of the proper candidate in our mental lexicon. One key issue for researchers on this field is to shed light on the role of phonological and orthographic processes in lexical access, as well as the choice of an input coding scheme for orthographic representations. In this paper we will review the state of the art about sublexical and lexical processes involved in lexical access. We will discuss behavioral, eye movement and electrophysiological evidence to understand: (i) which are the most important coding units, (ii) how our visual system codes identity and position of such units, (iii) which factors modulate the way we access lexical information in our minds, and (iv) the time course of such processes. We will do so from a methodological perspective, exploring a broad range of paradigms and effects that provide a complete framework about how printed words are coded and represented in our minds.

Linguistic complexity is usually approached in terms of markedness and branching structure, and psycholinguistic complexity in terms of frequency, sequential probability, and working memory load. However, predictions made on these bases appear to be inadequate to explain many patterns seen in aphasic speech. Psycholinguistic analyses of aphasic errors provide an empirical basis for describing lexical, morphological, and syntactic contributions to language complexity. We compare the predictions made by existing descriptions of complexity to aphasic error data as reported in cross‐linguistic studies. A construction‐based approach may be able to unify the patterns seen across lexicon, morphology and syntax.

Idioms are strings of words whose figurative meaning does not necessarily derive from that of the constituent parts. They belong to the vast and heterogeneous realm of multiword expressions, i.e. literal and non-literal word clusters whose representations are stored in semantic memory. This article provides an updated review of the psycholinguistic and electrophysiological literature on the processes underlying idiom comprehension with specific reference to the cues that lead to idiom recognition, to the syntactic and semantic behavior of idioms, to the relationships between literal compositionality and idiomatic meaning retrieval. Behavioral models of idiom comprehension are presented and discussed also with respect to the electrophysiological correlates of idiom and figurative language comprehension.

In order to study the factors influencing storage, access, and retrieval of idioms as they relate to advancing age, we investigated the properties of idioms that directly influence idiom production and their relation to aging. In particular, we selected measures of structural complexity (grammatical class, syntactic frozenness) and a measure of semantic complexity (compositionality) along with several other measures that interact with representation and processing (idiom familiarity, word frequency, semantic neighborhood density). The performance of younger adults (age 18–30) was predicted by idiom familiarity; that of older adults (age 60–85) was predicted by frozenness. In addition, both younger and older adults performed better on full-sentence idioms than on verb-phrase ones. The results are discussed within a theoretical framework of idiom production and aging.

This paper sketches a continuum between lexicon and syntax, with concrete examples from two typologically different languages, Finnish and English. While Finnish is a morphologically rich and relatively transparent synthetic language, full of inflectional and derivational morphology and compounding, English is clearly more analytical making use of particles, prepositions, and other free grammatical morphemes. The contrastive idiom analyses of these two languages offer us a glimpse into the multiplicity involved in idiomaticity and into the cooperation of the lexical and syntactic principles of language that takes place in the production of fixed, conventional, multiword utterances and through their ubiquity also in some phenomena that are involved in grammaticalization. On the basis of the discussion presented in this paper, it can be concluded that rather than forming a single continuum, the rich spectrum of lexical and syntactic constructions of these two languages can be thought of as forming a continuum of continua, where idioms reside at a culmination point, since they can be regarded as both lexical units and syntactic constructions at the same time.

With linguistics suffering from increasing fractionalization, it is necessary not to lose sight of the overall picture. It seems uncontroversial that the study of language consists of the following five components: processing, use, structure, variation, and change. While some of the relationships between these concepts have been investigated, a systematic integration of these components into a coherent framework is conspicuously missing. A modest attempt is made here to outline such a framework which makes the interrelationships of the components transparent. In all of these components, competition is found to play a key role. At its core, competition is a psycholinguistic effect which arises in the task of selecting an intended unit from among a number of elements concurrently activated in the processing network. The audible and visible outcome of the selection process is language use. Language structure is the prerequisite for competition in that it provides the set of competitors. When competition is low, consistent (i.e., invariant) language use emerges. When competition is high, language use is variable, i.e., synchronic variation occurs. When competition changes over time, language change takes place. Thus, it is language processing in general and competition in particular that constrains and binds together many phenomena of language use, structure, variation, and change.