Following an early claim by Nelson & McEvoy (35) suggesting that word associations can display 'spooky action at a distance behaviour', a serious investigation of the potentially quantum nature of such associations is currently underway. In this paper quantum theory is proposed as a framework suitable for modelling the human mental lexicon, specifically the results obtained from both intralist ...

This paper considers the possible relations between mental concepts and public words, and argues that there are many more concepts in our minds than words in the language we speak. These concepts may be both stable and communicable without being encoded in words. The concept communicated by use of a word on a given occasion may go well beyond the concept encoded. We show how these facts provide...

Vocabulary acquisition in both L1 and L2 has depended on the opinion of associative language learning to help recognize elucidate procedures lexical development mind learners. To date, studies this area have delivered relatively controversial findings. The current study revisited certain corresponding issues order gain insight into restoration words mental lexicon. Moreover, it also strived und...

The QWERTY keyboard mediates communication for millions of language users. Here we investigated whether differences in the way words are typed correspond to differences in their meanings. Some words are spelled with more letters on the right side of the keyboard and others with more letters on the left. We tested whether asymmetries in the way people interact with keys on the right and left of ...

This paper focusses on mental state adjectives and offers a unified analysis in the theory of Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky, 1991, 1995). We show that, instead of enumerating the various syntactic constructions they enter into, with the different senses which arise, it is possible to give them a rich typed semantic representation which will explain both their semantic and syntactic polymorphi...

Variation and change Ask two speakers to produce the same sentence and you will undoubtedly find a number of differences in the ways in which they say that sentence. Ask a single speaker to say the same sentence on more than one occasion and the same will be true. Such variation arises for a number of reasons. Allophonic variation in the pronunciation of individual sounds frequently seems rando...

Performance-based studies on the psychological nature of linguistic competence can conceal significant differences in the brain processes that underlie native versus nonnative knowledge of language. Here we report results from the brain activity of very proficient early bilinguals making a lexical decision task that illustrates this point. Two groups of Spanish-Catalan early bilinguals (Spanish...

This chapter investigates one of the most studied effect in psycholinguistics: the so-called "semantic priming effect". After a brief survey of the literature, a lexical decision experiment is presented and investigates two types of "semantic priming": (1) purely semantic priming without association, and (2) purely associative priming without semantic similarity. Three prime duration were teste...

We report a study of the relationship between form and meaning in the most frequent monosyllabic words in the lexicon of English. There is a small but significant correlation between the phonological distance and the semantic distance between each pair of words. To this extent, words that have similar meanings tend to sound similar. Words differ as to the size of this meaning-form correlation i...