Organizational and Formational Structures of Networks in the Mental Lexicon: A State-Of-The-Art through Systematic Review

Abstract

This state-of-the-art presents a systematic exploration on the use of network patterns in global research efforts to understand, organize and represent the mental lexicon. Results have shown an increase over recent years in the usage of complex, small-world and scale-free network patterns within the literature. With the increasing complexity of network patterns, we see more potential in the inter-disciplinary exploration of the mental lexicon through universal and mathematically-describable, behavioral patterns in small-world and scale-free networks. A systematic review of 36 items of methodologically-selected literature serve as a means to explore how the greater literary body understands network structures within the mental lexicon. Network-based approaches are discriminated between three contrasting varieties. These include: ‘simple networks’, characterized by arbitrarily organized graph patterns of metaphorical importance; ‘connectionist networks’, a broad category of networks which explore the structural features of a system through the analysis of emergent properties; and lastly ‘complex networks’, distinguished as small-world, scale-free networks which follow a strict and mathematically-describable structure in agreement with the Barabási–Albert model. Each network approach is explored in terms of their discernible differences which relate to their parameters and affect their implications. A final evaluation of observed patterns within the selected literature is offered, as well as an elaboration on the sense of trajectory beheld in the research in order to offer insight and orientation for future research.

Developing the “Language Profile Test” for Greek Students aged 11-15 Years.

“…From this point of view, our results are consistent with previous research that strongly associates word frequency as a metric for estimating word difficulty (Leroy & Kauchack, 2014), highlighting the influence of word frequency on reading comprehension (Chen & Meurers, 2016). Consequently, students' individual differences, with regard to the quality of their lexical representations, affect lexical precision in both lexical access and reading comprehension (Andrews & Hersch, 2010;Andrews & Lo, 2012;Andrews et al, 2020;Hersch & Andrews, 2012) as links between the nodes of the mental lexicon result in higher network connectivity for high-frequency words (McCarthy & Miralpeix, 2020;Steyvers & Tenenbaum, 2005), while low-frequency words have fewer connections (Hills et al, 2009).…”

“…Consequently, the four main features of a high-frequency word's identity (phonology, orthography, morphology, and meaning) are easily retrieved from the mental lexicon (Vonk et al, 2019), "the mental system which includes all the information a person knows about words" (Richards & Schmidt, 2010, p. 339). This suggests that word frequency, amongst other linguistic properties, influences the organization and the links between nodes of the mental lexicon, resulting in higher network connectivity for high-frequency words (McCarthy & Miralpeix, 2020;Steyvers & Tenenbaum, 2005;), whereas low-frequency words have fewer connections (Hills et al, 2009).…”

Discovering the structure and organization of a free Cantonese emotion-label word association graph to understand mental lexicons of emotions

“…In the past decades, network models have been developed and widely applied in understanding the organization of the mental lexicon. Small-world scale-free complex network, one of the major types of network model, enables us to explore the organizational features of the mental lexicon at different levels, including macroscopic, mesoscopic, and microscopic levels 31 . Macroscopic properties characterize the global organization, mesoscopic properties describe the subsets of nodes and word meanings, and microscopic properties focus on the connections of a single node to the rest of the network 15 .…”