The mental lexicon, known as the representation of words and morphemes in the mind, is a complex research area that draws attention from scholars across multiple disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, education, and computational cognitive science. However, due to the interdisciplinary nature of the field and the continuously evolving tools and theories related to the mental lexicon, researchers face obstacles in keeping up with the latest research frameworks and findings.The Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon is such a comprehensive volume to address these challenges. It covers interdisciplinary and updated research issues and consists of 30 chapters written by leading authors from a variety of interdisciplinary backgrounds. Each chapter introduces research issues and presents the author's perspectives on them, highlighting theoretical and methodological advances from various disciplines. The volume also identifies areas of disagreement and inconsistencies, which provide opportunities for further study and inspire researchers to make breakthroughs in the study of the mental lexicon.
MAIN CONTENTS OF THE BOOKThe volume is divided into an extensive introduction and three main parts, corresponding to three centered framing questions: what exactly do you know when you know the lexicon in your native language (the representation of the mental lexicon)? How did you come to know it (the acquisition of the mental lexicon)? How do you put that knowledge to use (the processing of the mental lexicon)? Each part begins with issues of form, then moves on to the discussion of meaning, and ends by addressing the interfaces and boundaries of the mental lexicon and other linguistic or nonlinguistic systems.Part I, Representing the Mental Lexicon, introduces the linguistic theories of how the mind represents words and sub-word units at the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic levels. The part includes three subparts: form (Chapters 2-4), meaning (Chapters 5-8), and interfaces and boundaries (Chapters 9-12). Chapter 2 supports a viewpoint of generative phonology that representational units of words are abstract and psychologically real from the evidence of the patterning in morpho-phonological paradigms, language change, sign language linguistics, and