Glossary L

Lexical access is defined as the identification of a word that allows people to gain access to the meaning of the word from memory. Lexical access, moreover, is the process of activating lexical items from semantic memory.

Lexical ambiguity refers to the idea that some words have different meanings; for example, bank can refer to the side of a river or to a financial institution, and a stool can refer to a chair or to feces. Lexical ambiguity is also defined as a form of ambiguity in which a word has more than one meaning.

Lexical categories is the term in Chomsky's Government and Binding Theory for categories of words, such as noun and verb that carry thematic content. Please see also Functional categories; Open-class word.

Lexical cohesion refers to the use of reiteration, synonymy, hyponymy, and other semantic relationships to link successive sentences in discourse.

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Lexical constraints refer to constraints that facilitate word learning in young children by limiting the possible interpretations that an utterance is likely to have. Please see Whole-object assumption, Taxonomic assumption, and Mutual exclusivity assumption. Also see Lexical principles.

Lexical contrast constraint is the notion that young children make inferences about word meanings by contrasting new words with words they already know.

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Lexical decision task is a task in which an experimental subject is presented with letter strings and asked to judge, as quickly as possible, if the strings form words; deciding as quickly as possible whether a string of letters is a real word or not. Moreover, Lexical decision task is an experimental task in which a subject sees a string of letters and must rapidly decide whether the string is a word.

Lexical insertion rules refer to rule that governs how lexical entries are inserted into a tree structure during the derivation of a sentence.

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