Abstract

Lexical availability studies make an account from a statistical point of view about the lexicon of a group of people and the extent to which these might be considered representative of a bigger population. Recent findings in lexical availability prove the existence of patterns in order and word choice when diferent individuals recall words after a certain category or center of interest is given as a stimulus, and that these patterns can be modeled as a graph. The following article goes beyond the common idea of lexical availability in terms of frequency, stating that lexical availability can be modeled from a probabilistic perspective, i.e. calculating the probability that a certain word is available given other previous words. This work also has implications in prototype semantics theory, as it provides a mathematical model to obtain structures of the mental lexicon that can be extrapolated to the members of specific groups of people.