Logogen
Logogen is a term from psycholinguistics and reading comprehension research. The term was coined by the British psycholinguist John Morton, who tried in 1969 with his Logogen model to visualize reading comprehension. A certain form of lexical representation of a word in the mental lexicon is called logogen . The information stored in the Logogen system relates to "knowledge of word forms ", in contrast to the "knowledge of word meanings " stored in the cognitive system .
According to this model, the logogen is seen as an abstract unit that is linked to the representation of a certain word in the brain via a combination of sensory stimuli. This determines how and when the word is made accessible for understanding by activating the cognitive system after a given threshold value of the logogen has been reached. A logogen “reacts” to certain phonetic , visual and semantic properties of the word. Different logogen systems are adopted for processing phonetic and visual word information. Each Logogen therefore has a specific degree of activation and area of application. When processing word information, it is registered by the logogen with the appropriate sensitivity (ie with the corresponding “ receptors ”). This increases the degree of activation of the logogene concerned and as soon as this exceeds a certain limit, the word is recognized by the cognitive system and its meaning is available from this moment on.
The Logogen model was further developed in 1976 by KI Forster, who expanded it from a purely passive system to a partially active system, in which the most common words have a lower activation limit from the outset. Critics from the German-speaking area complain that certain coding forms that are essential for deciphering the German language are not adequately described in the context of the Logogen model .
literature
- Morton, JM: Interaction of information in word recognition. In: Psychological Review, 76 (1969). Pp. 165-178.
- Forster, KI: Accessing the mental lexicon. In: Wales, RJ and Walker ECT (eds.): New approaches to language mechanisms. Amsterdam 1976.