The process of our brain

Knowledge of words is embedded in a set of weights on connections between processing units encoding orthographic, phonological, and semantic properties of words, and the correlations between these properties.

Thus, when any of the properties they mention (phonology, orthography and meaning) are activated at once the connections between them become stronger, like neurons firing and wiring together in the brain. These connections are mediated in a bottom-up process via a small number of “hidden units,” which are connected to the much more numerous “input units” that represent orthography, phonology and meaning. The hidden units cluster together inputs that co-occur (or “fire”) together. When connectionist models are tested on the computer, as the weights between units are refined over time, they tend to group words based on categories such as “noun,” “verb,” “animal” etc.This logical grouping of words that occurs via a completely bottom-up process flies in the face of the models discussed previously, which tend to operate in a more top-down manner. This approach, therefore, suggests that words are organized purely by associations between words as they are encountered in the world, with no "hard-wired" rules for organizing them in the brain, as suggested by the next approach we will discuss.


EXAMPLE:

The fact that a speaker can mentally find the word that he/she wants in less than 200 milliseconds, and in certain cases, even before it is heard, is proof that the mental lexicon is ordered in such a way as to facilitate access and retrieval.