Language and Mind Theoretical Review

16 and musical skills. Therefore, the activities in the human brain are very complex and well arranged. In a central area through both hemisphere, there is an area called as cortex. According to Rogers 2011:20, the cerebral cortex is the outer layer of gray matter on each outer layer of both hemispheres. He also adds that the cortex is divided into four types. They are the frontal lobes, temporal lobes, occipital lobes, and parietal lobes. The frontal lobes have to handle human’s ability to think, memorize, speak, and move their body. The temporal lobes take care of hearing, tasting, and smelling. The occipital lobe functions in sight and the parietal lobes manage touch. The brain structure can be illustrated as in the following figure. 17 Figure 2. The brain structure: hemispheres and the side view http:www.brightfocus.orgalzheimersaboutunderstandinganatomy-of-the-brain.html

4. Mental Lexicon

Having a correlation with the language processing, memory is considered as the systematic part of thought influencing how the language exists in the mind. The memory is like a store of thoughts while the mental lexicon becomes the part of the memory itself. According to Vater 2003:184, there is a central area of language representation which is known as the mental lexicon functioning in speech production and comprehension. Thus, the mental lexicon may contain information about what happens in human’s life represented through language. Libben and Jarema 2007:1 define a mental lexicon as the dictionary of words involved in the mind which is useful in language comprehension and production. It means that when a person speaks a language, he or she will possess, acquire, use, and even lose words which are taken from the dictionary, the mental lexicon. They also add that the mental lexicon refers to the source of doing some 18 lexical activities, such as saying, writing, and comprehending words. Hence, the mental lexicon takes an important role in communication. However, a person’s memory is built up gradually and it can also be destroyed gradually too. This condition happens in the mental lexicon which can be seen if a person’s mental lexicon can change more or less after reading a scholarly article or listening to a lecture. In this case, in term of the mental lexicon, the number of words in language depends on how this person often uses that language or increases his or her vocabularies. Hence, it can be said that the human’s mind is like a computer and that knowledge of words is stored like a dictionary requiring many vocabularies. According to Eltman 2004:301, mental lexicon is a kind of dictionary containing information which includes a word’s meaning, pronunciation, syntactic characteristics, and so on. That is why, the existence of mental lexicon becomes a crucial thing since it is the essential aspect for each speakers. Furthermore, it also influences how those words are activated, stored, processed, and retrieved.

5. Language Processing

Language has a key role to help people to convey, feel, and represent their thoughts to the others. Basically, it helps people to survive in their community. Besides, a successful communication may exist since the process of language is acquired well. According to Ingram 2007: 3, language processing is seen as the way how human produces and understands words or speech. He 2007: