Introduction
The study of the mental lexicon deals with how words are acquired, comprehended, organized, stored, retrieved, and produces. The term “mental lexicon” is used interchangeably with what some scholars refer to as “internal lexicon” (Bonin, 2004). It involves the different processes and activations done in the brain in order to store the words and form an internal memory which functions as a mental dictionary. Psychologist and linguists who are concerned with this study believe that words are stored in relation to their phonological, semantic, syntactic and even orthographical features.
Early studies in this field were established by the end of the 1960s. The major focus of the studies was on the comprehension and production of the words. Most of the studies were oriented to psychology. The introduction of this concept into linguistics shifted the attention to the phonological, semantic, and syntactic representations in the mind. Aitchison (1994) described mental lexicon as the permanent human dictionary in which words and their meanings are stored in the brain. On the other hand, Richards (2000) described mental lexicon as the organized mental representations of the concepts and knowledge which are related to the words. There are three scopes of word knowledge; phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic.
I. Phonological Knowledge
The focus on the phonological mental memory was first initiated by Paul Meara (1980). He argued that the organization of words in memory depend on the phonological knowledge of the words in second language acquisition. However, in first language acquisition the memory depends on the semantic knowledge. Mear (1980) conducted a study on lexical performance in fir...
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Words are instinctive—the fundamental expression of thoughts secondary to thoughts. They are, indeed, the translations of thoughts, the inexact and practical interpretations of them. They communicate.
In order to understand linguistic intelligence it is important to understand the mechanisms that control speech and language. These mechanisms can be broken down into four major groups: speech generation (talking), speech comprehension (hearing), writing generation (writing), and writing comprehension (reading).
Altogether this study has helped us learn more about the brain and memory. Learning is measured thorough when a student can reiterate the right answer to a question. In this study, students in one conditions learned forging language vocabulary words in standard example of recurrent study exam trials. In three other conditions, once a student had correctly formed the language item, it was constantly studied but dropped from further testing. Repeatedly tested but dropped from the further study or just dropped from both the study and also the test. The results reveal the critical part of retrieval practice in combining education and shows that even college students seem naive of the fact.
Throughout history, language has been a significant part of how humans are able to communicate with each other. Communication is a vital part to the way humans live and even survive with each other. Languages are all unique, and they can possibly be a factor in the way humans solve problems or think in general. In the essay “How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?,” Lera Boroditsky delves into this complex topic. She specifically focuses on the topic of language and how people’s thinking can actually change depending on the language that they speak. To effectively prove her argument, she has conducted many experiments with her students and colleges that test the way that groups of people complete tasks differently based on their language.
Over the years, memory have been researched and debated, however there are two theories that have explained extensively and are highly recognised by psychologist in the cognitive field of psychology and scientist alike, on how we process experiences and turn them into memories. These theories include the Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) Multi-store Model of Memory and Baddeley and Hitch (1974) Phonological Loop Model of Memory. This essay aims to compare, contrast and evaluate these models of memory, with supporting evidence and empirical research.
Over thousands of years language has evolved and continued to develop to what we know it as today. Throughout the years, it has been studied how we learn language and the benefits of learning it as well as the deficits of not learning it. While studying language it is important to consider the language acquisition device, language acquisition support system, and Infant-Directed and Adult-Directed Speech. Not only is it important to learn language in general, but there are specific sensitive periods in which a human must learn the language in order to obtain developmental milestones. The sensitive period is also crucial when learning a second language and can greatly affect the human when speaking that language. During the sensitive period while a child is learning language it is important that they learn the specifics about language structure and the aspects of language. Once the child has learned the aspects of language, they are also emerged into learning universal grammar. Lastly, the learning of language has influenced ontogeny and phylogeny in various ways. This influence will continue to arise as change occurs and humans and the world continue to develop and evolve.
...erican Council of the Teaching of Foreign Languages. (2012). ACTFL Proficiency Guildelines 2012. Retrieved from http://www.actfl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/public/ACTFLProficiencyGuidelines2012_FINAL.pdf
The way language works, then, is that each person’s brain contains a lexicon of words and the concepts they stand for (a mental dictionary) and a set of rules that combine the words that convey relationships among concepts (a mental grammar) (Pinker 85). Language uses grammar which is a discrete combinational system that has two important consequences
Language is an essential thing needed to communicate and to develop the skills one needs to be a complete, whole, intelligent individual. Language is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Here we shall define language and lexicon, evaluate the key features of language, describe the four levels of language structure and processing, and analyze the role of language processing in cognitive psychology.
NLP comprises three essential elements neuro, linguistic, and programming. Neuro consists of the nervous system through which an experience is received and processed through the five senses. “The importance of neuro lies in listening, observing, and identifying the language pattern of people, and in the normal course, responds in the same manner in line with the principle of mirroring” (Tripathi, 2012). Linguistic consists of language and non-verbal communication approaches which neural interpretations are implied, structured, and given sense. “The eyebrows, the lips, the shoulders, the hands, the legs, fingers all form an integrated team in conveying messages like feeling, response, and even our intentions” (Tripathi, 2012). Therefore, unknowingly one’s body language can expose one’s unconscious thoughts. Programming consists wit...
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In learning the second language, morphological awareness plays an important role. One of the most outstanding contributions of morphological awareness to language learning is in reading, where more than any other language element, vocabulary knowledge is needed. About 60 percent of the unfamiliar words which a reader encounters while reading a text, have meaning which can be predicted based on their component parts (Nagy and Anderson, 1984); so a reader with more information about word formation processes would be better able to infer, guess, and finally comprehend the meanings of unfamiliar words(Nagy, Berninger, Abbott, and Vaughan,
«Traditional» researchers believe that great apes cannot meaningfully relate words. They believe that apes just use words which are mostly liked by their trainers in each concrete situation, but they can be meaningless to apes. For example, «only 12 percent of utterances were spontaneous-that is, 88 percent were preceded by a teacher’s utterance» (Herbert Terrace, 1979). In addition, a famous psychology professor at Columbia University, Herbert Terrace, argues that «even if an animal produced such a sequence» as «water bird,» «we could not conclude that it was a sentence» (1979). Moreover, «the words and word order may be meaningful to an English s...
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