A word-based account of comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda nouns in the Discriminative Lexicon

Abstract

What are the cognitive units in the mental lexicon of Bantu speakers, words or morphemes? The very small experimental literature addressing this question suggests that the answer is morphemes, but a closer look at the results shows that this is answer is premature. A novel theory of the mental lexicon, the Discriminative Lexicon, which incorporates a word-based view of the mental lexicon and is computational implemented in the Linear Discriminative Learner (LDL), is put to the test with a data set of 11180 Kinyarwanda nouns. LDL is used to model comprehension and production of the nouns in the data set. LDL predicts comprehension and production of nouns with great accuracy. We conclude that the cognitive units in the mental lexicon of Kinyarwanda speakers are words.