This document discusses words, meaning, and their relationship. It covers: 1. Words and meaning are related but separate entities. Words are represented mentally as lexemes while meaning involves concepts. 2. Morphemes are the smallest units of words - free morphemes can stand alone as words while bound require attachment. 3. Models of lexical access including serial search, parallel access like logogen and connectionist models, and the cohort model for word recognition. Frequency, imageability, semantics, phonology and other factors influence word access and organization in the mental lexicon.

1. Words and Meaning:
From Primitives to
Complex Organization
Dahlia G. Maglasang
Reporter

2. Words and Meaning: Separate but
linked Domains
• Words and meaning are related but separate
entities
3 Arguments
• 1. Translation arguments
• 2. Imperfect mapping illustration
• 3. The elasticity argument

3. The study of words
• Morphemes that can stand by themselves as
words are called free morphemes e.g. run,
walk, keyboard
• those that require attachment to other units
are known as bound morpheme(pre-, dis-, in-,
un-, -ful, -able, -ment, -ly, -ise)

4. • Word primitives ( the smallest form in which a
word is stored in the mental lexicon is a
separate entry (lexeme) in our lexicons.
• Each variant of a word has its own
representation (book ,books, bookish).When
we hear or read a word we access its lexeme
as a whole.
• Another hypothesis is that words are made up
of constituent morphemes that these
morphemes serve as word primitives.

5. Factors influencing Word Access and
Organization
1. Frequency (Predict or vilify, angry or puddle)
2. Imageability and concreteness and
abstractness (apple ,wisdom ,umbrella ,evil )
3. Semantics (needle-thread, pin; king-queen-
Semantic associate)
4. Grammatical Class

6. • Open-class words are the basic content words
in the language expresses as nouns, verbs,
adjectives, and adverbs
• Closed-class words are function words that
traditionally provide the architecture for our
sentences but no content- words such as the,
and, from on so forth…
5. Phonology- (TOT) Tip of the tongue
phenomenon.

7. Models of Lexical Access
• Serial Search model. It claims that when we
encounter a word while reading, for example-
we look through a lexical list to determine
whether the item is a words or not, and then
retrieve the necessary information about the
word( such as meaning or grammatical class).
Serial search model means that the process
takes place by scanning one lexical entry at a
time, sequentially.

8. • Parallel Access Models.
• Logogen Model Morton (1969,1979 proposed
that words are not accessed by determining
their locations in the lexicon but by being
activated to a certain threshold.
• Connectionist Model Advocates of this
approach in psychology, philosophy, computer
science, and other fields, known as
connectionist, use the analogy of the brain
and neurons to develop models of cognition
process.

9. Nodes are of three types : input nodes
which process the auditory or visual
stimuli; output nodes, which
determine the responses, and hidden
nodes, which perform the internal
processing between when we hear
and see a word and when we respond
to it.

10. • Cohort Model
• Design to account only for auditory word
recognition (Marslen-Wilson 1987) proposed
that when we hear a word, all of its
phonological neighbors get activated as well. .
Thus, upon hearing the sentence, Paul got a
job at the ca….
candy…cash….candle….cashier…camp, and
many others would-be available for selection.
This set of words is known as the word initial
cohort ( refers to a division of words)

11. MEANING
• Determining what constitutes meaning and
formulating accurate definitions that cover all
possible instances of a concept has been the
difficult job of philosopher.
• The meaning of a term is referred to as its
intension. For example , there are two intension
of the concept chair- an object upon which we sit
,and a person who heads a meeting or
organization. The set of that to which a word
applies is known as extension….
•

12. Philosophical Theories of Meaning
• REFERENCE THEORY. This theory postulates
that the meaning of a term is the object to
which that term refers in the real world(that
is, its referent)
• Ideational theory. According to British
philosopher John Locke, words in their
primary and immediate signification stand for
nothing but the ideas in the mind of him that
uses them

13. Alternative Theories: Meaning is in
the Public Domain
• This view is supported by philosopher Quine
(1960), who postulated that the meaning of
individual words can never be strictly derived.
According to Quine, words even sentences
have no meaning independently , but are
based on their connection to other words and
sentences within the language

14. Conceptual Primitives
Three issues address the study of meaning
1. What are the smallest units (or primitives)of meaning?
2. Morpheme are considered the primitives of words, as
complex can be composed of several individual
morphemes.
3. Whether concepts have clear boundaries or not. (what
counts as a cup and not)
• Whether it is sufficient to represent a category as a list
of features.(The morpheme dis- and agree can go
together, but ot un-and agree

15. Feature Theory
• Some characteristics that count as features
can be designated as either perceptual (gray,
large like an elephant), functional (Used to
transport people (Vehicles), microstructural
(composed of hydrogen and oxygen,
molecules, of water)or societal/conventional
(supreme ruler, of a king or queen)
• Features can be considered as meaningful
units themselves.

16. Variations of Features Theories
• The classical View. The proponent o the classical
view consider features the smallest units of
meaning. They also contend that concepts are
defined in a rule like fashion, with clear
boundaries
• The family Resemblance.
a. Characteristics
b. Family resemblance
c. Category or concept

17. Knowledge based Approaches
• Psychological essentialism is the position
advocated by Medin & Ortony (1989) that people
act as if things have essences or underlying
natures that make them the thing that they are.
• Psychological Contextualism refers to the idea
that certain either defined by goal or by culture,
can provide the bond between features in a
concept and concepts in a category.

18. Models of Semantic Representation

19. A special problem for the mental
lexical: Lexical Ambiguity
• We use language to convey an intended
meaning in the mind of the speaker or writer
that can be accurately decoded by the listener
or reader. Ambiguous words may foil
comprehension because of their multiple
meanings.
• Single word can have multiple meanings
:BANK can mean (1) a place to store money,
(2) the side of a river, (3) what a race car
driver does when he encounters a steep turn.

20. Reciprocal and Influential Relationships Of
words and meaning
• Reference Principle leads learners to assume that a
word denotes or maps onto an object, event, or
property.
• The object scope principle leads learner to look for a
whole object rather than as a referent.
• The extendability principle posits that children assume
that a word refers not to a single object, action, or
event, but to a class of objects, actions, and events.
• The categorical scope principle leads learner to extend
words to the same kinds of things
• The novel name/nameless category principle biases
learners to assume that a novel word refers to an
unnamed object in the environment rather than to an
object that already has a name.

21. Thank you ..