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Īlthough the mental lexicon is often called a mental "dictionary", in actuality, research suggests that it differs greatly from a dictionary. The development of a second mental lexicon (L2) in bilingual speakers has also emerged as a topic of interest, suggesting that a speaker's multiple languages are not stored together, but as separate entities that are actively chosen from in each linguistic situation. Recent studies have also shown the possibility that the mental lexicon can shrink as an individual ages, limiting the number of words they can remember and learn. The following article addresses some of the physiological, social, and linguistic aspects of the mental lexicon. Neurologists and neurolinguists also study the areas of the brain involved in lexical representations. Some theories about the mental lexicon include the spectrum theory, the dual-coding theory, Chomsky's nativist theory, as well as the semantic network theory.
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An individual's mental lexicon changes and grows as new words are learned and is always developing, but there are several competing theories seeking to explain exactly how this occurs. The mental lexicon differs from the lexicon more generally in that it is not just a collection of words instead, it deals with how those words are activated, stored, processed, and retrieved by each speaker. However, there is some disagreement as to the utility of the mental lexicon as a scientific construct. The mental lexicon is a construct used in linguistics and psycholinguistics to refer to individual speakers' lexical, or word, representations.
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The mental lexicon is defined as a mental dictionary that contains information regarding a word, such as its meaning, pronunciation, and syntactic characteristics. Mental dictionary containing meaning, pronunciation and syntactic characteristics of words
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