A mental lexicon is defined as a mental dictionary that contains information regarding a word's meaning. (WIKI). ... The mental lexicon is a construct used in linguistics and psycholinguistics to refer to individual speaker's lexical, or word, representations. ... The mental lexicon differs from the lexicon in that it is not just a general collection of words; instead, it deals with how those words are activated, stored, processed, and retrieved by each speaker.
This document reflects on this idea and responds to the ideas presented in the Wikipedias article on 'mental lexicons'. In particular, it addresses the practical probleM (of computational linguistics) of how you can represent a mental lexicon as data structures in a computer.
Here I present my obsetvations and a set of explicit responses to remarks made either in the Wikipedia or in the worka of researchers in limguistics. It proposes a specific solution to the problems examined by these scholars as it relates to the task of building an artificial (ie computer) system that has an understanding of our world, simular enough to our own, that we can hold meaningful conversations with it. We will call this artifact 'intelligent' just in case our interactions with it are ... z
An implication of this remark is that the intelligence of an artifact is NOT a property of the artifact but is a judgement (inside me) about the artifact. I attribute 'intelligence' to the artifact when my interaction with it is sufficiently 'rich'.
My interest (and expertise) does not include the understanding of sound and how the sounds we hear get incorporated into our thinking. I am content to imagine that I will communicate with this artifact using text. The same goes for images as acquired using vision. It is mot that I don't think these types of inputs are important, but my main concern is what is inside the 'head' of our aretfact rather than which sensors are used to acquire its knowledge.
To be clear. We can reasonable describe the keyboard we type on to interact with Our artifact is the sensor ite uses to 'listen' to us and rather than use sounds, we imagine that it speaks to us using a text display. Operationaly this is like its hearing speach using an ear and speaking to us using its vocal cords and mouth, We will use the vocabulary of sounds (hearing and speaking) in what follows when mentioning input and output.
To make my description easier to write I will assume we are talking about 'Fred' and use it (him?) as the subject of our attention.