Mental lexicon
![Adapted from the Hierarchical Model of Collins and Quillian (1969)](/Images/godic/202501/26/Hierarchical_Model_Mental_Lexicon3636.png")
![Average vocabulary size of an English-speaking child by age.](/Images/godic/202501/26/Chart_updated3636.jpg")
![The Internal Structure of a Lexical Entry (adapted from Levelt 1989).](/Images/godic/202501/26/Structure_of_a_lexical_entry3637.png")
The mental lexicon is defined as a mental dictionary that contains information regarding a word's meaning, pronunciation, syntactic characteristics, and so on.
The mental lexicon is a construct used in linguistics and psycholinguistics to refer to individual speakers’ lexical, or word, representations. However, not all scientists agree as to the utility of the mental lexicon as a scientific construct.