Social Construction of an Abstract Lexicon

Abstract word meanings, being purely mental constructs, depend on the mediation of language to be learnt, as well as recalled and used. Recent findings showed that adult native speakers of the same language do not share the same mental grammar and vocabularies because they attend to different cues in the input. Therefore, we conducted a study investigating the role of educational attainment and exposure to rich reading experiences (RRE) as social factors impacting the capacity to form associations and recall collocations within the abstract lexicon. The primary objectives of this study were: 1. to establish a relationship between social factors and the capacity to form associations and recall collocations within abstract lexicon and, 2. to understand the parallelism between social factors affecting the potential for building abstract lexicon and the types of cues encoded in the architecture of language. We not only found that two populations differ in the size and depth of their abstract mental lexicons, but also that there is a parallelism between the types of cues conditioned by the education attainment and the exposure to RRE.