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Mental Files and the Lexicon

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Abstract

This paper presents the hypothesis that the representational repertoire underpinning our ability to process the lexical items of a natural language (that is, the mental lexicon) can be modeled as a system of mental files. To start, I clarify the basic phenomena that an account of lexical knowledge should be able to elucidate. Then, I propose to evaluate whether the mental files theory can be brought to bear on an account of the representational format of lexical knowledge by modeling mental words as recognitional files.

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Notes

  1. Alternative versions of MFT include Strawson (1974), Evans (1982), Bach (1987), and Perry (2001). A mental file φ is a mental representation that can typically be described on the basis of three elements: a reference-fixing relation R, a label L, and a content C. R is a relation between φ and some particular object O that φ is about (or to which φ refers). C is the information that φ associates to O. L is a term or a description used by the possessor of φ to designate O.

  2. The most significant analogue I can think of in psycholinguistics is the autonomous search model of Forster (1976), which sees word recognition as a process based on file-like access representations. However, the concept of ‘file’ at work in Forster’s model was developed independently from the notion of ‘file’ featuring in recent philosophical discussion.

  3. The mental lexicon can be broadly defined as the cognitive system hosting the long-term representations of the semantic, syntactic, morphological, and phonographic properties of the words mastered by a speaker of a natural language. Mental lexicons are thus constituents of Chomskyan I-languages (Chomsky 1986) and can be equated with the lexical component of an individual’s language capacity.

  4. To avoid confusion, it is perhaps useful to specify that my talk of ‘modalities’ does not refer to the usual distinction among sensory modalities (e.g., hearing and sight). Following a well-established practice in psycholinguistics, I call ‘modalities’ the types of linguistic input (syntactic, morphological, etc.) whereby an entry of the mental lexicon can be activated.

  5. A version of this idea can be found in Morton’s (1969) logogen model, or in the augmented addressed morphology developed by Caramazza et al. (1985) and Laudanna and Burani (1985). See also Tyler, Waksler and Marslen-Wilson (1993).

  6. The simplification is due to the fact that actual spoken word recognition is normally influenced by factors other than those involved in the analysis of the shape of acoustic stimuli. Agents use a combination of segmentation cues (e.g., syntax and stress pattern) to break up the auditory stream and identify the linguistic items conveyed in continuous speech (e.g., Sander and Neville 2000). However, this does not alter the fact that spoken word recognition can be viewed as a process mapping acoustic stimuli to invariant word-form categories (Dahan and Magnuson 2006; DeWitt and Rauschecker 2012).

  7. Usage-based approaches to lexical meaning are regarded by some as controversial. For instance, Borg’s (2012) organizational lexical semantics maintains that the linguistic content encoded by lexical types yields the semantic information required to build the truth conditions of well-formed declarative sentences under a minimal appeal to context and general-purpose abilities. I cannot do more than gesture toward this controversy here, but the reader should bear in mind that if a minimalist approach to lexical semantics turned out to be correct, the arguments presented in this paper would have to be substantially revised. Ludlow (2014) offers a valuable discussion of the advantages of a usage-based approach to lexical semantics.

  8. GoOpen(x) instructions emulate the GOTO (fc) instructions that are responsible for the recruitment and the update of topical cards in Vallduví’s (1992) work on file change semantics. For more details, see Hendriks and Dekker (1996), Vallduví and Engdahl (1996), and McNally (1998).

  9. Naturally, this is a simplified toy model. The polysemy of find is much wider and more complex than what I may seem to be suggesting here, even in cases where the verb is followed by a sentential complement introduced by that (e.g., “Upon further research, I found that he had been wrong all the time”).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to François Recanati, Michael Murez, Tomoo Ueda, and two anonymous reviewers for valuable input on the initial manuscript. The usual disclaimer applies. The research that led to this paper has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013, MSCA-COFUND) under grant agreement No. 245743, Program Braudel-IFER-FMSH Program, in collaboration with the Institut Jean Nicod and the Labex IEC, ENS Paris.

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    Luca Gasparri

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Gasparri, L. Mental Files and the Lexicon. Rev.Phil.Psych. 7, 463–472 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0262-3

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