Words in the Mind

An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon

Jean Aitchison

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118170960
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Featuring new coverage of the brain and language, and lexical corpora, the 4th edition of Words in the Mind offers readers the latest thinking about the ways in which we learn words, remember them, understand them, and find the ones we want to use.

• Explores the latest insights into the complex relationship between language, words, and the human mind, creating a rich and revealing resource for students and non-specialists alike
• Addresses the structure and content of the human word-store – the 'mental lexicon' – with particular reference to the spoken language of native English speakers
• Features a wealth of new material, including an all-new chapter focusing exclusively on the brain and language, and enhanced coverage of lexical corpora – computerized databases – and on lexical change of meaning
• Incorporates numerous updates throughout, including expansion of many notes and suggestions for further reading
• Comprises state-of-the-art research, yet remains accessible and student-friendly
  

Part I

Aims and Evidence

1

Welcome to Dictionopolis!

— The human word-store —

Before long they saw in the distance the towers and flags of Dictionopolis sparkling in the sunshine, and in a few moments they reached the great wall and stood at the gateway to the city.

“A-H-H-H-R-R-E-M-M-”, roared the sentry, clearing his throat and snapping smartly to attention. “This is Dictionopolis, a happy kingdom, advantageously located in the Foothills of Confusion and caressed by gentle breezes from the Sea of Knowledge . . . Dictionopolis is the place where all the words in the world come from. They’re grown right here in our orchards.”

Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“Words glisten. Words irradiate exquisite splendour. Words carry magic and keep us spell-bound . . . Words are like glamorous bricks that constitute the fabric of any language . . . Words are like roses that make the environment fragrant”, asserts the writer of a textbook urging people to improve their vocabulary.¹

Few people regard words with the awe and reverence of this author. Most of us use them all the time without thinking. Yet words are supremely important. Everyone needs them, and a normal person probably comes into contact with thousands in the course of a normal day. We would be quite lost without them: “I wanted to utter a word, but that word I cannot remember; and the bodiless thought will now return to the palace of shadows”, said the Russian poet Mandelstam.²

The frustration of being without words is vividly expressed in Stevie Smith’s poem “In the park”:

“Pray for the Mute who have no word to say.”
Cried the one old gentleman, “Not because they are dumb,
But they are weak. And the weak thoughts beating in the brain
Generate a sort of heat, yet cannot speak.
Thoughts that are bound without sound
In the tomb of the brain’s room, wound. Pray for the Mute.”

On a less poetic level, someone who has had a stroke can illustrate clearly the handicap suffered by those who just cannot think of the words they want. For example, K.C., a highly intelligent solicitor, was quite unable to remember the name of a box of matches: “Waitresses. Waitrixies. A backland and another bank. For bandicks er bandiks I think they are, I believe they’re zandicks, I’m sorry, but they’re called flitters landocks.” He had equal difficulty when shown a telephone: “Ooh that, that sir. I can show you then what is a zapricks for the elencom, the elencom, with the pidland thing to the . . . and then each of the pidlands has an eye in, one, two, three, and so on.”³

Most people are convinced that they need to know a lot of words, and become worried if they cannot recall a word they want. Yet most of the time they will have relatively little difficulty in remembering the thousands of words needed for everyday conversation. This is a considerable feat.

However, speakers of a language are unlikely to have given much thought to this remarkable skill. Even those who deal with language professionally, such as speech therapists and teachers, know relatively little about how humans cope with all these words. Their lack of knowledge is not surprising since there is little information readily available about key issues, such as “How are words stored in the mind?,” “How do people find the words they want when they speak?,” “Do children remember words in the same way as adults?,” and so on.

This is the topic of this book. It will primarily consider how we store words in our mind, and how we retrieve them from this store when we need them. The overall aim is to produce outline specifications, as it were, for a working model of the word-store in the human mind. This turns out to be a huge subject. In order to narrow it down somewhat, the book will focus on the spoken words of people whose native language is English. English has been selected because, up till now, more work has been done on it than on any other language. And spoken speech has been chosen because native speakers of English talk it before they learn to read or write it. Reading, writing and other languages will therefore be mentioned only intermittently, when work on them illuminates the topic under discussion. The decision to concentrate on spoken English means that bilingualism and multilingualism are not directly discussed – though hopefully the findings will shed light on how people cope with the vocabulary of more than one language.

Mazes Intricate

Mazes intricate,
Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular
Then most, when most irregular they seem.

Milton’s description of the planets in Paradise Lost ⁴ could apply equally well to the human word-store. Planets might appear to the untrained observer to wander randomly round the night sky, yet in fact their movements are under the control of natural laws which are not obvious to the naked eye. Similarly, words are not just stacked higgledy-piggledy in our minds, like leaves on an autumn bonfire. Instead, they are organized into an intricate, interlocking system whose underlying principles can be discovered.

Words cannot be heaped up randomly in the mind for two reasons. First, there are so many of them. Second, they can be found so fast. Psychologists have shown that human memory is both flexible and extendable, provided that the information is structured.⁵ Random facts and figures are extremely difficult to remember, but enormous quantities of data can be remembered and utilized, as long as they are well organized.

However, to say that humans know “so many” words and find them “so fast” is somewhat vague. What number are we talking about? And what speed are we referring to? Let us briefly consider these two points.

Native speakers of a language almost certainly know more words than they imagine. Educated adults generally estimate their own vocabulary at only 1 to 10 percent of the real level, it has been claimed.⁶ Most people behave somewhat like the rustics in Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “The Deserted Village.” The villagers gather round to listen in awe to the schoolmaster, whose verbal knowledge amazes them:

Words of learned length and thund’ring sound
Amazed the gazing rustics rang’d around,
And still they gaz’d, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.

While admiring the word power of their local schoolteacher, the rustics did not realize that the word-store within each one of their heads was probably almost as great as that of the teacher. Even highly educated people can make ludicrously low guesses. In the middle of the last century Dean Farrar, a respected intellectual, pronounced on the vocabulary of some peasants after eavesdropping on them as they chatted: “I once listened for a long time together to the conversation of three peasants who were gathering apples among the boughs of an orchard, and as far as I could conjecture, the whole number of words they used did not exceed a hundred.”⁷ They managed with this small number, he surmised, because “the same word was made to serve a multitude of purposes, and the same coarse expletives recurred with a horrible frequency in the place of every single part of speech.”

Over a century later, the French writer Georges Simenon was reported as saying that he tried to make his style as simple as possible because he had read somewhere that over half the people in France used no more than a total of 600 words.⁸ Simenon’s figure is perhaps as much the product of wishful thinking as his claim to have slept with 10,000 women in his life. At the very least one should probably exchange the numbers of words and women, though 10,000 words is still likely to be an underestimate.

An educated adult might well know more than 150,000 words, and be able to actively use 90 percent of these, according to one calculation.⁹ This figure is controversial, because of the problems of defining “word” and the difficulty of finding a reliable procedure for assessing vocabulary knowledge. However, Seashore and Eckerson were pioneers of a method still sometimes used for measuring vocabulary size. It might be useful, therefore, to consider how they reached their conclusions, even though they are now thought to have overestimated the total, and their techniques have been subsequently modified.

Seashore and Eckerson defined a “word” as an item listed in the 1937 edition of Funk and Wagnall’s New Standard Dictionary of the English Language, which contains approximately 450,000 entries. They reduced this to 370,000 by omitting alternative meanings. Of these, they reckoned that just under half, about 166,000, were “basic words” such as loyal, and the remaining 204,000 or so were derivatives, and compounds, such as loyalism, loyalize, loyally and Loyal Legion. Obviously it is impractical to test anyone on all the words in the dictionary, so a representative sample of the total needs to be obtained. The researchers did this by taking the third word down in the first column of every left-hand page. This gave a list of 1320 words, which they divided into four. Several hundred college students were tested on their ability to define the words on each list and to use them in illustrative sentences.

Seashore and Eckerson found that their subjects were surprisingly knowledgeable. On average, the students knew 35 percent of the common “basic words” on the list, 1 percent of the rare “basic words” and 47 percent of the derivatives and compounds. When these proportions were applied to the overall number of words in the whole dictionary, the average college student turned out to know approximately 58,000 common “basic words,” 1700 rare “basic words” and 96,000 derivatives and compounds. The overall total comes to over 150,000. The highest student score was almost 200,000, while even the lowest was over 100,000. Later researchers have pointed out a number of flaws in Seashore and Eckerson’s methodology. The students might have been able to guess the meaning and use of derivatives from a knowledge of the “basic words” to which they are related. Also, bright students tend to overestimate their knowledge. Take the word kneehole. This is the space under a desk for a person’s knees. Yet someone who was “quite sure” he knew the word suggested it was a hole worn by a person’s knee through thin fabric trousers. In contrast, less good pupils think they know words which are similar to others. When asked to use the word burrow in a sentence, one child wrote: “May I burrow your pencil?,” confusing it with borrow, and another: “You take away rubbish in a wheelburrow,” instead of wheelbarrow.

The “big dictionary effect” is another problem: the bigger the dictionary used, the more words people are found to know, partly because bigger dictionaries include more homonyms (different words with the same form). The word must probably elicits the meaning “should, is obligated to” (“You must wash your hands”) in the mind of someone asked about it. Yet a dictionary sample might have picked on must “the newly pressed juice of grapes,” or even must “a state of frenzied sexual excitement in the males of large mammals, especially elephants.”

It’s also difficult to know what level of knowledge is being tapped. One person claiming to know aardvark might think of it only as a strange wild animal, but another might be able to describe it as a nocturnal mammal with long ears and a snout which feeds on termites and inhabits the grasslands of Africa.¹⁰

In spite of these problems, assessment of a dictionary sample has turned out to be a useful way of estimating vocabulary size, mainly because it allows a large number of words to be reviewed. The method has been refined somewhat since Seashore and Eckerson’s pioneering work: non-words are normally included in the sample, in order to detect unreliable respondents. Different levels of list are tested, each controlled for the frequency of occurrence of the words selected. Students are no longer always asked to give a straight “yes–no” answer to whether they know it, but can also reply “maybe” if the word sounds vaguely familiar.¹¹

On the basis of this method, some tentative conclusions are possible. An educated adult speaker of English can understand, and potentially use, at least 50,000 words, with a word provisionally defined as a “dictionary entry.” Modern dictionaries usually include different forms of a word under the same entry, so sing, sings, sang, sung would all com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Symbols
• Part I: Aims and Evidence
• Part II: Basic Ingredients
• Part III: Newcomers
• Part IV: The Overall Picture
• Notes
• References
• Index