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The days of having a dictionary on your bookshelf are numbered. But that\u2019s OK, because everyone already walks around with a dictionary \u2013 not the one on your phone, but the one in your head.<\/p>\n
Just like a physical dictionary, your\u00a0mental dictionary<\/a>\u00a0contains information about words. This includes the letters, sounds and meaning, or semantics, of words, as well as information about parts of speech and how you can fit words together to form grammatical sentences. Your mental dictionary is also like a thesaurus. It can help you connect words and see how they might be similar in meaning, sound or spelling.<\/p>\n As a\u00a0researcher who studies word retrieval<\/a>, or how you quickly and accurately pull words out of your memory to communicate, I\u2019m intrigued by how words are organized in our mental dictionaries. Everyone\u2019s mental dictionary is a little bit different. And I\u2019m even more intrigued by how we can restore the content of our mental dictionaries or improve our use of them, particularly for those who have language disorders.<\/p>\n Language is part of\u00a0what makes humans special<\/a>, and I believe everyone deserves the chance to use their words with others.<\/p>\n While a physical dictionary is helpful for shared knowledge, your personal mental dictionary is customized based on your individual experiences. What words are in my mental dictionary might overlap with the mental dictionary of someone else who also speaks the same language, but there will also be a lot of differences between the content of our dictionaries.<\/p>\n You add words to your mental dictionary through your educational, occupational, cultural and other life experiences. This customization also means that the size of mental dictionaries is a little bit different from person to person and varies by age. Researchers found that the\u00a0average 20-year-old American English speaker<\/a>\u00a0knows about 42,000 unique words, and this number grows to about 48,000 by age 60. Some people will have even larger vocabularies.<\/p>\n By now, you might be envisioning your mental dictionary as a book with pages of words in alphabetical order you can flip through as needed. While this visual analogy is helpful, there is a lot of debate about how mental dictionaries are organized. Many scholars agree that it\u2019s probably not like an alphabetized book.<\/p>\n One widely rejected theory, the\u00a0grandmother cell theory<\/a>, suggests that each concept is encoded by a single neuron. This implies that you would have a neuron for every word that you know, including \u201cgrandmother.\u201d<\/p>\nYour mental dictionary<\/strong><\/h4>\n