Unveiling the nature of interaction between semantics and phonology in lexical access based on multilayer networks

Orr Levy, Yoed N. Kenett, Orr Oxenberg, Nichol Castro, Simon De Deyne, Michael S. Vitevitch, Shlomo Havlin

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

27 Scopus citations

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 languageEnglish
Article number14479
JournalScientific Reports
Volume11
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 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.

FundersFunder number
NSF-BSF2019740
Office of Naval Research
Defense Threat Reduction AgencyHDTRA- 1-19-1-0016
United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation
Japan Science and Technology AgencyHDTRA-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

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