Abstract
An essential aspect of human communication is the ability to access and retrieve information from ones’ ‘mental lexicon’. This lexical access activates phonological and semantic components of concepts, yet the question whether and how these two components relate to each other remains widely debated. We harness tools from network science to construct a large-scale linguistic multilayer network comprising of phonological and semantic layers. We find that the links in the two layers are highly similar to each other and that adding information from one layer to the other increases efficiency by decreasing the network overall distances, but specifically affecting shorter distances. Finally, we show how a multilayer architecture demonstrates the highest efficiency, and how this efficiency relates to weak semantic relations between cue words in the network. Thus, investigating the interaction between the layers and the unique benefit of a linguistic multilayer architecture allows us to quantify theoretical cognitive models of lexical access.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 14479 |
Journal | Scientific Reports |
Volume | 11 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 14 Jul 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2021, The Author(s).
Funding
We acknowledge the Israel Science Foundation, ONR, the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) with the Italy Ministry of Foreign Affairs, NSF-BSF Grant No. 2019740, MOST with the Japan Science and Technology Agency, the BIU Center for Research in Applied Cryptography and Cyber Security, and DTRA (Grant No. HDTRA-1-19-1-0016) for financial support. We thank Abhilasha Kumar, David Balota, and Mark Steyvers for sharing their data with us, which allowed us to generalize our findings and demonstrate its validity.
Funders | Funder number |
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NSF-BSF | 2019740 |
Office of Naval Research | |
Defense Threat Reduction Agency | HDTRA- 1-19-1-0016 |
United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation | |
Japan Science and Technology Agency | HDTRA-1-19-1-0016 |
Ministry of Foreign Affairs | |
Israel Science Foundation | |
Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan | |
Ministry of science and technology, Israel | |
Center for Research in Applied Cryptography and Cyber Security, Bar-Ilan University |