Words in Mind
Sarah Ye
Contents
“Word in Mind”, written by Jean Aitchison, a Professor of Language munication at the University of Oxford, is all about words: how humans manage to store such a large number of words, how they find the quick access to the word in need, what’s the relationship among words, whether it is possible for us to build up a model to represent how mental lexicon works, whether children learn to store new words in the same way like adults or not. All these problems related to the nature of word-store will be discussed in the first 8 chapters.
Chapter One: The Human Word-store
In the first chapter, the author supposes that the words in the mental lexical are like books in a library.
Working in the similar way of storing books, we might put new words into our mind and make anized in a special order. Even word-store is likened to a book dictionary.
When we are about to consult them, it does not work in the same alphabetical order as book dictionary does.
The words in mind are not dealt with in isolation. Under every mental entry, there is far more detailed information concerning to collocation, pronunciation, syntactic pattern and whether it is frequently used or not.
Consequently, mental lexicon is much sophisticated, for orderliness is never a prime requirement and both the number of words and the content the words are ready to change at any time.
Chapter Two: Assessing the Evidence
The second chapter deals with word searches, word-finding problems of aphasics, psycholinguistic experiments and the work of theoretical linguists.
To reveal how the speech mechanism works, the author does some research of slips of tongue.
Experts have tried their best to analyze the aphasic symptom. Different kinds of psycholinguistic experiments such as priming, phoneme monitoring and word-learning have been carried out to gain insights into mental lexicon.
However, neither experiments nor linguists’ theoretical efforts speak for the nature of mental lex
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