Mental lexicon

The mental lexicon is defined as a mental dictionary that contains information regarding a word's meaning, pronunciation, syntactic characteristics, and so on.

The mental lexicon is a construct used in linguistics and psycholinguistics to refer to individual speakers' lexical, or word, representations. However, not all scientists agree as to the utility of the mental lexicon as a scientific construct.

The mental lexicon differs from the lexicon in that it is not just a general collection of words; instead, it deals with how those words are activated, stored, processed, and retrieved by each speaker. An individual's mental lexicon changes and grows as new words are learned and is always developing, but there are several theorists that argue exactly how this occurs. Some theories about the mental lexicon include the spectrum theory, the dual-coding theory, Chomsky's nativist theory, as well as the semantic network theory. Scientists also study the areas of the brain involved in lexical representations. The following addresses some of the physiological, social, and linguistic aspects of the mental lexicon.

Recent studies have also shown the possibility that the mental lexicon can shrink as an individual ages, limiting the amount of words they can remember and learn. The development of a second mental lexicon (L2) in bilingual speakers has also emerged as a topic of interest, suggesting that a speaker's multiple languages are not stored together, but as separate entities that are actively chosen from in each linguistic situation.

Although the mental lexicon is often called a mental "dictionary", in actuality, research suggests that it differs greatly from a dictionary. For example, the mental lexicon is not organized alphabetically like a dictionary; rather, it seems to be organized in a more complex manner, with links between phonologically and semantically related lexical items. This is suggested by evidence of phenomena such as slips of the tongue, which showed that replacing words such as anecdote for antidote.

Also, while dictionaries contain a fixed number of words to be counted, and remain outdated as language is continually changing, the mental lexicon consistently updates itself with new words and word meanings, while getting rid of old, unused words. The active nature of the mental lexicon makes any dictionary comparison unhelpful. Research is continuing to identify the exact way that words are linked and accessed. A common method to analyze these connections is through a lexical decision task.

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