HET 227 - MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX

Group Members :

SANGGARI M THANABALAN (153341)

ZURIAWANI BT DORI (153381)
VAEDHAPRIEYA MURUKA NATHAN (152809)
ASHLEY TAN HUI LENG (151790)

Lecturer : Dr Yasir Azam

Assignment: Tutorial Task (Infographic)

The Mental Lexicon
 THE MENTAL LEXICON
Words are the important components that make up a language. Words
are the major communicative tools that we use to talk about events,
ideas, science, arts and so on. In language acquisition, words comes
first. Children in particular needs to learn language step by step from
the word level like nouns, verbs and adjectives, which moves on to
phrase level such as noun phrase and verb phrase.

What is a lexicon?
It offers a unique window on the
process of language acquisition as a
whole. The present study makes an
attempt to focus on children's
When first learning a language,
emerging knowledge of the
children need learn word forms
conventional lexicon and their growing
which are used by speakers around
knowledge of word structure reflected
them. They need to memorise the
on their formation of new words.
meanings of each word, the word
class it belongs to(noun/verb, etc),
its' internal parts, and how it's
pronounced.

The lexicon
The lexicon of a language is the
stock of established words speakers
Mental Lexicon
can draw on when they speak and
Words: smallest semantic units that can
have a recourse on what they hear. It move around to form new sequences with
is stored in their memories, so that a different meanings.

speaker can make sense of what
they are about to speak or hear by
looking up in thier memory banks
and retrieving them to convey
Grammatical category: two or more words
have the same form.
Grammatical setting: a word may have
distinct meanings that two or more words
are proposed.

specific meanings. These expressions must be stored in

memory, therefore, mental lexicon is a
vast memory store that is organized like a
dictionary. It has a mental list of lexical
items with detailed information.

Lexical Entries
Consists of (at least) 4 kinds of information;
the meaning (a), syntactic form (b),
morphological structure (c), and phonological
shape (d).
To summarize it:-
(a) + (b): Lemma
(c) + (d): Form Example
Lemma + Form: Lexical entry
Example: “Yeah, it was pretty ok.”
Lexical entry (generally): conceptual
information that is tagged/ pointed to by the

lexical item in question. 1. We can easily notice the slightly negative

It is linked internally to other parts of the entry
connotation in the sentence.
like the set of syntactic properties that are
2. Mental lexicons it also stores syntactic
associated to the possible syntactic
environments. information of items.
3. “Pretty” as an adjective, for instance, only
collocates with female human beings.
4. It shows in how many different correct
grammatical forms the vocabulary item
“pretty” can occur.