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Updated: Aug 23, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
An alternative view of the mental lexicon
1Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA. jelman@ucsd.edu <jelman@ucsd.edu>
Abstract:
An essential aspect of knowing language is knowing the words of that language. This knowledge is usually thought to reside in the mental lexicon, a kind of dictionary that contains information regarding a word's meaning, pronunciation, syntactic characteristics, and so on. In this article, a very different view is presented. In this view, words are understood as stimuli that operate directly on mental states. The phonological, syntactic and semantic properties of a word are revealed by the effects it has on those states.
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