Lemma (psycholinguistics)
This article may be too technical for most readers to understand.(April 2017) |
In
When a person produces a word, they are essentially turning their thoughts into sounds, a process known as
This two-staged model is the most widely supported theory of speech production in psycholinguistics,[2] although it has been challenged.[3] For example, there is some evidence to indicate that the grammatical gender of a noun is retrieved from the word's phonological form (the lexeme) rather than from the lemma.[4] This can be explained by models that do not assume a distinct level between the semantic and the phonological stages (and so lack a lemma representation).[3]
During the process of language activation, lemma retrieval is the first step in lexical access. In this step, meaning and the syntactic elements of a lexical item are realized as the lemma. Lemma retrieval, as explained through a spreading-activation theory, is part of a network of separate elements consisting of the abstract concept, the lemma and the lexeme. Lemma retrieval is aided by the activation level of the concept that has yet to be verbalized. When activation takes place on the lemma level, the highest activated lemma element is selected.[5]
Lexical selection experiments have provided evidence that lemma retrieval is affected by the frequency of the word.[6] This indicates that word frequency is not only significant for retrieving the lexical elements, but also in accessing semantic and syntactic elements for encoding lemmas into a phrase.[7]
Experiments that have studied the Tip-of-the tongue (TOT) phenomenon have provided evidence that less strong connections of phonological elements (lexemes) and lexical and syntactic representation (lemmas) lead to an inability to retrieve a lexical item.[8] TOT utterances provide evidence that the lemmas and lexemes are separate processes in language activation.[9]
See also
References
- ISBN 978-0521130561. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
- ^ Harley, T. (2005). The Psychology of Language. Hove; New York: Psychology Press. p. 359.
- ^ .
- S2CID 51826019.
- S2CID 25237845.
- ^ "Short article Does word frequency affect lexical selection in speech production? (PDF Download Available)". ResearchGate. Retrieved 2017-05-02.
- ^ Kormos, Judit. (1998). PROBLEM-SOLVING MECHANISMS IN L2 COMMUNICATION. Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 20. 349 - 385.
- ^ Hofferberth-Sauer, N. J. (2014). "Resolving tip-of-the-tongue states with syllable cues". In V. Torrens & L. Escobar (Eds.), the Processing of Lexicon and Morphosyntax: (pp. 43–68).
- ISBN 978-90-272-1232-0.