Language-specific properties of the lexicon: Implications for learning and processing

Abstract

This paper presents a discussion of the constraints imposed on lexicalisation during production by language-specific patterns, such as whether words exist in a language to describe a given event and whether language-specific syntactic and phonological information correlates with semantic properties. First, we introduce in broad strokes relevant architectural assumptions concerning the levels of representation consulted in lexicalising concepts and we discuss how cross-linguistic research can inform both architectural and processing assumptions. We then assess whether information at one level can affect processing at other levels. In particular we address issues of separability and information flow between lexico-semantic information, on one hand, and conceptual, syntactic, and phonological information on the other hand. Our aim is not to provide a new theory of lexicalisation and lexical retrieval in production, but to discuss the consequences of language-specific effects on lexicalisation for the architecture of the production system, the processes engaged during word-learning, and the information flow during production.

Acknowledgment

The work reported here was supported by a ESRC research grant to Gabriella Vigliocco (RES000230038). We would like to thank Stavroula Kousta, Padraig O'Seaghdha, and David Vinson for their comments on previous versions of the manuscript.

Notes

¹In this paper, we use the term ‘word-form’ just to refer to phonological properties of words. We remain agnostic as to whether ‘word-forms’ constitute a level of representation of its own that bundles phonemes.

²This is not to say that there are no statistical semantics-phonology correlations beyond onomatopoeias at all in these languages (e.g., Rapp & Goldrick, 2000).

³As an anonymous reviewer suggested, a possible alternative is that the linguistic effect on gesture is ‘direct’, namely, at the level of gesture-specific planning representation. According to this proposal, the linguistic effect is not mediated by general conceptual representations that can provide information to various output modalities, including gesture and speech.

⁴We excluded from analyses all errors which exhibited the greatest phonological similarity to the targets, that is those sharing 33% or more of the target word's phonemes in either language. This value was determined by setting a threshold at the mean, plus one standard deviation, of the phonological similarity proportion of all targets and errors in a given category; comparable thresholds were obtained for animal and tool categories even though they were separately analysed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sotaro Kita

Correspondence should be addressed to Gabriella Vigliocco, Department of Psychology, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London WC1, UK. [email protected]