Building word meanings from memories and predictions

Successful communication requires that members of a language community share a common store of knowledge about words and their meanings. Yet, words show remarkable flexibility, adapting to different situations and extending their meanings in novel and creative ways. The FUSE (Flexible Use of Semantic and Episodic knowledge) model offers a unified account of stability and flexibility in word meaning. Word meanings are constructed dynamically by integrating relatively stable, stored lexical-semantic knowledge with context-specific semantic predictions and idiosyncratic semantic associations that are retrieved from episodic memory. When words are ambiguous or used in unfamiliar or creative ways, contextual predictions and episodic memories become especially important, compensating for the limitations of stored lexical knowledge.