lexcitació

Lexcitació is a term used in some Catalan-language discussions of psycholinguistics to denote the process of activating lexical representations in the mental lexicon during language processing. The concept fits within the broader idea of lexical activation or lexical access in psycholinguistics and is often described in models of how words are retrieved, integrated, and produced in real time.

The term blends a reference to the lexicon with a notion of excitation, and it is used to describe the spreading activation that occurs when a cue or context activates related lexical entries. While the exact usage varies across authors, the core idea is that recognizing, retrieving, or producing a word involves not only a single entry but a network of related forms, meanings, and phonological representations that become briefly more excitable.

Empirical support comes from paradigms such as semantic priming and masked priming, lexical decision tasks, and electrophysiological measures like event-related potentials (ERP) that track the time course of lexical activation. Neuroimaging work points to involvement of temporal regions (for lexical storage and access) and frontal regions (for selection and control) during activation and retrieval of words.

Lexcitació informs theories of the mental lexicon, reading, and speech production, and is often discussed alongside related concepts such as lexical access, semantic priming, and word recognition. In English-language literature, more common terms are lexical activation or lexical access, but lexcitació serves as a catalanized designation for the same underlying process.