CHAPTER OUTLINE

In this chapter you will learn why we make a basic distinction between the dictionary and the mental lexicon.

• We will look at how linguists study the mental lexicon and how children acquire words.

• We will consider whether complex words are stored in the mental lexicon, or derived by rules, or both.

• And we will look further at how dictionaries have evolved and how they differ from one another and from the mental lexicon.

KEY TERMS

word, mental, lexicon, lexicography, the Gavagai problem, fast mapping, aphasia

Introduction

In the last chapter, we raised the question “what's a word?” And we saw in section 1.2 that this question actually subsumes two more specific questions. In this chapter we will look more closely at those questions.

On the one hand, when we ask “what's a word?,” we may be asking about the fundamental nature of wordhood – as we saw, a far thornier philosophical question than it would seem at first blush. Native speakers of a language seem to know intuitively what a ‘word’ is in their language, even if they have trouble coming up with a definition of ‘word’. Interestingly, the Oxford American Dictionary seems to bank on this intuitive knowledge when it defines a word as “a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed.”