The Effects Of Contextual Constraints On Meaning Selection In The Mental Lexicon

Mental lexicon is an intangible structure of lexicon in mind. Each person owns such a store of lexicon. When people try to comprehend the meaning of words, they will search the features of the meaning in mind in order to reach meaning perception. While communicating, the normal speed of utterance is about 125-180 words per minute, which means that both utterer and receiver demand a retrieval of 2-3 words per second. The access of mental lexicon depends on context for the words, most of which are polysemous. The context helps to come to the access of proper meaning. So meaning perception requires the assistance from context in daily communication. Thus, the study of the context-dependent aspects of utterance interpretation is still a quite hot issue.The paper applies psychological and pragmatic theories to an investigation on the contextual constraints on meaning selection. Through several studies, we can see that contextual constraints have the function that helps to make choices during meaning comprehension. This function of context shows how the meaning is selected and interpreted by contextual assumptions during comprehension. With the purpose of making a deep survey on this function, on the one hand, it discusses how context constrains meaning selection in mental process. On the other hand, it examines how these mental concepts of meaning work under the influence of context. Successful choice depends on appropriate choice of context. With the analysis, this paper concludes that contextual constraints are of vital importance for further studies of meaning production and perception. And this study would be a good guidance for teaching vocabulary in context.