Janssen, N. & Barber, H.
Department of Psychology, Universidad de La Laguna, La Laguna, Spain
Traditional views on the organization of the mental lexicon argue that lexical storage is reserved for morphologically simple forms (e.g., 'red', 'car', 'plural-s'), and that multi-word sequences whose meaning is transparent (e.g., “the red car”) are not stored, but are generated from the simple forms. In two experiments we tested this view. In Experiment 1, Spanish participants produced noun + adjective, and noun + noun phrases that were elicited by experimental displays consisting of colored line drawings and two superimposed line drawings. In Experiment 2, two groups of French participants produced noun + adjective, and determiner + noun + adjective utterances elicited by colored line drawings. In both experiments, naming latencies decreased with increasing frequency of the multi-word phrase, and were unaffected by the frequency of the object name in the utterance. These results suggest that short two and three word phrases whose meaning is transparent are stored in the lexicon. These data are inconsistent with the traditional view, and suggest that lexical storage is determined by statistical learning mechanisms that are sensitive to the distributional properties with which linguistic tokens occur in the language environment.