Lexicon 1 Review Sheet Answers

Answer the following questions in the space provided.

1. What kind of information would your lexicon include?

• Sound pattern of the word or pronunciation (phololgy, stress, # of syllables)
• Meaning of the word
• Syntactic class of the word
• Morphological knowledge

2. Indicate the difference between an open class word and a closed class word. Also the difference between an inflectional morpheme and a derivational morpheme.

Open class words are the content words in the language expressed as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. A language can contain an infinite number of these types of words, as new words get invented to explain new objects or concepts.
Closed class words are function words that traditionally provide the architecture for our sentences but bear no content. E.g. the, and, from, etc. They are called “closed” because new words are rarely added to this class.
Derivational morphemes significantly alter the root morphemes to which they are added. E.g. the derivational morpheme –ion changes decide (a verb) into decision (a noun).
Inflectional morphemes are involved when a bound morpheme is added to a free morpheme to express grammatical contrasts in sentences. E.g. plural markers and past tense markers.

3. Describe the decompositional view of morphemes as word primitives and give one advantage of such a view.

This hypothesis centers around the fact that words are made up of constituent morphemes and that these morphemes serve as word primitives. When we listen to someone speaking, we decompose words into morphemes in order to comprehend spoken language. We strip a word of all affixes and then activate the root word plus the relevant bound morphemes. Likewise, when we speak, we access individual morphemes and combine them to make up complex words.
This view has the advantage of cognitive economy. E.g. neighborhoods.

4. Describe the sentence verification task used by Collins and Quillian to test the hierarchical model of storing information.

In such a model some elements stand above or below other ones. This type of approach means that we can infer certain types of information that we haven’t been explicitly presented with. In a sentence verification task, the subjects is presented with a statement of the form An A is a B, such as “An apple is a fruit” and asked to determine as quickly as possible whether the sentence is true or false. The time taken to answer whether the sentence is true or false is measured.

5. What is a spreading activation model?

This model assumes that words are represented in the internal lexicon in a network, but the organization is not strictly hierarchical. In contrast, the organization is closer to a web of interconnecting nodes, with the distance between the nodes determined by both structural characteristics such as taxonomic relations and considerations such as typicality and degree of association between related concepts.

6. List the 3 methodologies used when research on lexical access is done.

• Lexical Decision – A listener either hears an item, or sees it written on a computer screen, and has to say whether it is a real word in the language or not. Reaction time is measured.
• Identification in noise – a word is played to a listener, but in a noisy background, making it harder to hear. We measure how accurate they are at naming the word.
• Picture naming – subjects are shown a picture and have to say what it is. Usually reaction time is measure, although we can also measure accuracy.

7. Describe the cohort model of lexical access.

This model deal sonly with the processing of auditory language, when we hear a wod, all of its phonological neighbors are activated. The correct word is chosen by eliminating words that do not match the input stimulus, either because of more incoming phonological data or because of the context of the spoken sentence.

Answer the following multiple-choice questions.

1. all

2. See page 171.

3. b

4. c

5. b

6. b

7. d