People know thousands of words in their native language, and each of these words must be learned at some time in the person's lifetime. A large number of these words will be learned when the person is an adult, reflecting the fact that the mental lexicon is continuously changing. We explore how new words get added to the mental lexicon, and provide empirical support for a theoretical distinction between what we call lexical configuration and lexical engagement. Lexical configuration is the set of factual knowledge associated with a word (e.g., the word's sound, spelling, meaning, or syntactic role). Almost all previous research on word learning has focused on this aspect. However, it is also critical to understand the process by which a word becomes capable of lexical engagement--the ways in which a lexical entry dynamically interacts with other lexical entries, and with sublexical representations. For example, lexical entries compete with each other during word recognition (inhibition within the lexical level), and they also support the activation of their constituents (top-down lexical-phonemic facilitation, and lexically-based perceptual learning). We systematically vary the learning conditions for new words, and use separate measures of lexical configuration and engagement. Several surprising dissociations in behavior demonstrate the importance of the theoretical distinction between configuration and engagement.

中文翻译：

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词汇配置和词汇参与：成年人学习新单词时


人们知道数以千计的母语单词，而这些单词中的每一个都必须在人一生中的某个时间学习。当一个人成年后，就会学到大量这些单词，这反映了心理词典在不断变化的事实。我们探索新单词如何添加到心理词典中，并为我们所说的词汇配置和词汇参与之间的理论区别提供经验支持。词汇配置是与单词相关的一组事实知识（例如，单词的声音、拼写、含义或句法角色）。以往所有关于单词学习的研究几乎都集中在这方面。然而，理解单词能够进行词汇参与的过程也很重要，即词汇条目与其他词汇条目以及词汇下表示动态交互的方式。例如，词汇条目在单词识别过程中相互竞争（词汇层面的抑制），并且它们还支持其成分的激活（自上而下的词汇音素促进和基于词汇的感知学习）。我们系统地改变新单词的学习条件，并使用单独的词汇配置和参与度测量。一些令人惊讶的行为分离证明了配置和参与之间理论上区别的重要性。