Word knowledge and word usage - Representations and processes in the mental lexicon

The final NetWordS Conference, held on the 30th and 31st of March, and 1st of April 2015in Pisa, was convened by Prof. Pier Marco Bertinetto, Dr. Vito Pirrelli and Dr. ClaudiaMarzi, and brought together 91 participants (scholars, Post-Docs, PhD students) fromnumerous European, and some non-European, countries.A 3-day schedule involved all participants in a focused, cross-disciplinary discussion onrepresentations and processes in the mental lexicon.People are known to understand, memorise and parse words in a context-sensitive,opportunistic way, by caching their most habitual and productive processing patterns intoroutinized behavioural schemes, similarly to what we observe for sequences ofcoordinated motor acts. Speakers, however, do not only take advantage of token-basedinformation such as frequency of individual, holistically stored words, or episodicmemories of word usage, but they are also able to organise stored word forms throughabstract paradigmatic structures (or word families) whose overall size and distributionare important determinants of lexical categorisation, inference and productivity. Lexicalorganisation is, in fact, not necessarily functional to descriptive economy andminimisation of storage, but appears to be influenced by more dynamic, communicationorientedfunctions such as memorisation, prediction-based recognition and production.Lending support to this view, usage-based approaches to word processing have recentlyoffered novel explanatory frameworks that capitalise on the stable correlation patternsbetween lexical representations on the one hand and process-based operations thatmake representations functional to communicative exchanges on the other hand. Byfocusing on the battery of cognitive functions supporting verbal communication (rangingfrom input recoding to rehearsal, access, recall and coactivation) and by exploring their psycholinguistic correlates and neuroanatomical substrates, these approaches promotea new view of language architecture as an emergent property of the interaction betweenlanguage-specific input conditions and low-level, domain-specific cognitivepredispositions.