Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

DISLEX models the human lexical system at the level of physical structures, i.e. maps and pathways. It consists of a semantic memory and a number of modality-specific symbol memories, implemented as feature maps. Distributed representations for the word symbols and their meanings are stored on the maps, and linked with associative connections. The memory organization and the associations are formed in an unsupervised process, based on co-occurrence of the physical symbol and its meaning. DISLEX models processing of ambiguous words, i.e. homonyms and synonyms, and dyslexic errors in input and in production. Lesioning the system produces lexical deficits similar to human aphasia. DISLEX-1 is an AI implementation of the model, which can be used as the lexicon module in distributed natural language processing systems.