title: An alternative view of the mental lexicon.
abstract: An essential aspect of knowing language is knowing the words of that language. This knowledge is usually thought to reside in the mental lexicon, a kind of dictionary that contains information regarding a word's meaning, pronunciation, syntactic characteristics, and so on. In this article, a very different view is presented. In this view, words are understood as stimuli that operate directly on mental states. The phonological, syntactic and semantic properties of a word are revealed by the effects it has on those states.
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA. jelman@ucsd.edu <jelman@ucsd.edu>
authors.forename: Jeffrey L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Elman
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010700:Phonetics; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*