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==None==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1347/foreword.pdf
Foreword
This international conference “Word Knowledge and Word Usage: Representations and pro-
cesses in the mental lexicon” is the final outcome of 4 years of intense multi-disciplinary
research networking and cooperation funded by the European Science Foundation within the
framework of the NetWordS programme (May 2011 - April 2015).
NetWordS’ mission was to bring together experts of various research fields (from brain sci-
ences and computing to cognition and linguistics) and of different theoretical inclinations,
to advance the current awareness of theoretical, typological, psycholinguistic, computational
and neurophysiological evidence on the structure and processing of words, with a view to de-
veloping novel research paradigms and bringing up a new generation of language scholars.
The conference was intended to provide a first forum for assessing current progress of cross-
disciplinary research on language architecture and usage, and discussing prospects of future
synergy.
People are known to memorise, parse and access words in a context-sensitive and opportunis-
tic way, by caching their most habitual and productive processing patterns into routinized
behavioural schemes. Speakers not only take advantage of token-based information such as
frequency of individual, holistically stored words, but they are also able to organise stored
words through paradigmatic structures (or word families) whose overall size and frequency
is an important determinant of ease of lexical access and interpretation. Accordingly, lexical
organisation is not necessarily functional to descriptive economy and minimisation of storage,
but to more performance-oriented factors such as efficiency of memorisation, access and recall.
Usage-based approaches to word processing lend support to this view, to promote explana-
tory frameworks that aim to investigate the stable correlation patterns linking distributional
entrenchment of lexical units with productivity, internal structure and ease of interpretation.
Ultimately, this is intended to establish a deep interconnection between performance-oriented,
low-level lexical functions such as memorisation, rehearsal, access and recall, and their neu-
roanatomical correlates.
The impressive wealth of data and approaches reported in 23 oral presentations and 19 posters
(selected from 84 original submissions), and the broader perspectives broached by Wolfgang
U. Dressler, Marta Kutas, Gabriella Vigliocco and Michael Zock, provided compelling evidence
that the time has now come for this area to make a significant methodological leap towards
tighter and targeted synergy. The overall conference message was clear. Interdisciplinarity
should be coupled with both theoretical modelling and quantitative analysis of empirical ev-
idence. Any truly interdisciplinary effort must take advantage of the many methodological
caveats that psycholinguists, neurolinguists, theoretical and cognitive linguists, historical lin-
guists, typologists and computational linguists have developed over many years of relatively
independent work. Integration of their data and approaches will necessary mean more com-
plex models, far more constrained, explanatory and comprehensive than any other account
put forward so far. There is general consensus that joining forces in this research area will
not only lead to considerable progress in our theoretical understanding of the physiology of
communication, but will also be conducive to more effective ways to help real people engaged
in their daily communicative exchanges.
The conference was held in Pisa at the Scuola Normale Superiore, between March 30th and April
1st 2015, and benefited from the invaluable support and advice of Prof. Pier Marco Bertinetto
and his team, to whom our warmest thanks go.
Pisa, April 2nd , 2015
Vito Pirrelli
Claudia Marzi
Marcello Ferro
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