Networks in the mind – what communities reveal about the structure of the lexicon

Abstract

The mental lexicon stores words and information about words. The lexicon is seen by many researchers as a network, where lexical units are nodes and the different links between the units are connections. Based on the analysis of a word association network, in this article we show that different kinds of associative connections exist in the mental lexicon. Our analysis is based on a word association database from the agglutinative language Hungarian. We use communities – closely knit groups – of the lexicon to provide evidence for the existence and coexistence of different connections. We search for communities in the database using two different algorithms, enabling us to see the overlapping (a word belongs to multiple communities) and non-overlapping (a word belongs to only one community) community structures. Our results show that the network of the lexicon is organized by semantic, phonetic, syntactic and grammatical connections, but encyclopedic knowledge and individual experiences are also shaping the associative structure. We also show that words may be connected not just by one, but more types of connections at the same time.

Brands, networks, communities: How brand names are wired in the mind

“…Communities detected with this approach are overlapping; a word may belong to multiple communities. This is in line with the observations made in [ 52 ].…”

“…In the second step, we searched for communities in which all associations were named by at least four participants to see even more stable structures and whether they differ from those named by at least two respondents. With this setting, the algorithm found 164 communities containing 2801 different words with community sizes between 2 and 114 members, as in [ 52 ].…”

“…Participants took part in the experiment voluntarily, and they could end the experiment anytime by simply navigating away from the webpage. Details of the data collection are described in more detail in [ 52 ] and exhaustively–although in Hungarian–in [ 33 ].…”

“…Word association networks also have a distinct community structure. It has been shown that the communities have an overlapping character in word association networks [ 50 ], and word communities form groups according to common semantic or grammatical information [ 50 – 52 ] or phonetic similarities [cf. 52 , 53 ].…”

“…It has been shown that the communities have an overlapping character in word association networks [ 50 ], and word communities form groups according to common semantic or grammatical information [ 50 – 52 ] or phonetic similarities [cf. 52 , 53 ]. Communities can also help analyze label-homogeneous communities of the mental lexicon [ 54 ] and provide new insights into the study of semantic frames as communities [ 55 ].…”