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武蔵野大学大学院 人間社会研究科 人間学専攻 言語聴覚コース 入学試験問題（１2 月 17 日）［ 英語 ］
問題１ 下記の文章を読んで、問いに答えなさい
The days of having a dictionary on your bookshelf are numbered. But that’s OK,
because everyone already walks around with a dictionary – not the one on your phone, but
the one in your head.
Just like a physical dictionary, your mental dictionary contains information aboutwords. This includes the letters, sounds and meaning, or semantics, of words, as well as
information about parts of speech and how you can fit words together to form grammaticalsentences. Your mental dictionary is also like a ①thesaurus. It can help you connect words
and see how they might be similar in meaning, sound, or spelling.
As a researcher who studies word retrieval, or how you quickly and accurately pullwords out of your memory to communicate, ②I’m intrigued by how words are organized in
our mental dictionaries. Everyone’s mental dictionary is a little bit different. And I’m evenmore intrigued by how we can restore the content of our mental dictionaries or improve
our use of them, particularly for those who have language disorders.
Language is part of what makes humans special, and I believe everyone deserves
the chance to use their words with others.
Your mental dictionary③
While a physical dictionary is helpful for shared knowledge, your personal mental
dictionary is customized based on your individual experiences. What words are in mymental dictionary might overlap with the mental dictionary of someone else who also
speaks the same language, but there will also be a lot of differences between the contentof our dictionaries.
You add words to your mental dictionary through your educational, occupational,cultural, and other life experiences. This customization also means that the size of mental
dictionaries is a little bit different from person to person and varies by age. Researchers
found that the average 20-year-old American English speaker knows about 42,000 unique
words, and this number grows to about 48,000 by age 60. Some people will have even larger
vocabularies.
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By now, you might be envisioning your mental dictionary as a book with pages ofwords in alphabetical order you can flip through as needed. While this visual analogy ishelpful, there is a lot of debate about how mental dictionaries are organized. Many scholars
agree that it’s probably not like an alphabetized book.
One widely rejected theory, ④ the grandmother cell theory, suggests that eachconcept is encoded by a single neuron. This implies that you would have a neuron for every
word that you know, including “grandmother.”
While not accepted as accurate, the aspect of the grandmother cell theory
suggesting that certain parts of the brain are more important for some types of informationthan others is likely true. For example, the left temporal lobe on the side of your brain has
many regions that are important for language processing, including word retrieval andproduction. ⑤Rather than a single neuron responsible for processing a concept, a model
called parallel distributed processing proposes that large networks of neurons across thebrain work together to bring about word knowledge when they fire together.
For example, when I say the word “dog,” there are lots of different aspects of theword that your brain is retrieving, even if unconsciously. You might be thinking about whata dog smells like after being out in the rain, what a dog sounds like when it barks, or whata dog feels like when you pet it. You might be thinking about a specific dog you grew up
with, or you might have a variety of emotions about dogs based on your past experienceswith them. All of these different features of “dog” are processed in slightly different partsof your brain.
Using your mental dictionary
One reason why your mental dictionary can’t be like a physical dictionary is that it
is dynamic and quickly accessed.
Your brain’s ability to retrieve a word is very fast. In one study, researchers mapped
the time course of word retrieval among 24 college students by recording their brain
activity while they named pictures. They found evidence that participants selected words
within 200 milliseconds of seeing the image. After word selection, their brain continued toprocess information about that word, like what sounds are needed to say that chosen word
and ignoring related words. This is why you can retrieve words with such speed in realtime conversations, often so quickly that you give little conscious attention to that process.
Until … you have a breakdown in word retrieval. One common failure in word
retrieval is called ⑥the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. It’s the feeling when you know whatword you want to use but are unable to find it in that moment. You might even know
specific details about the word you want, like other words with similar meaning or maybe
the first letter or sound of that word. With enough time, the word you wanted might pop
into your mind.
These tip-of-the-tongue experiences are a normal part of human languageexperience across the life span, and they increase as you grow older. One proposed reason2

for this increase is that they’re due to an age-related disruption in the ability to turn on
the right sounds needed to say the selected word.
For some people, though, tip-of-the-tongue experiences and other speech errors canbe quite impairing. This is commonly seen in aphasia, a language disorder that often occurs
after injury to the language centers of the brain, such as stroke, or neurodegeneration,such as dementia. People with aphasia often have difficulty with word retrieval.
Fortunately, there are treatments available that can help someone improve theirword retrieval abilities. For example, ⑦semantic feature analysis focuses on strengthening
the semantic relationships between words. There are also treatments like phonomotor
treatment that focus on strengthening the selection and production of speech sounds
needed for word production. There are even apps that remotely provide word retrieval
therapy on phones or computers.
The next time you have a conversation with someone, take a moment to reflect on
why you chose the specific words you did. Remember that the words you use and the mental
dictionary you have are part of what make you and your voice unique.
(Scientific American, November 15, 2023)より改変
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-does-your-brain-remember-and-retrieve-words/

問１．下線部１の語について簡潔に説明しなさい（20～40 字）。
問２．下線部２を和訳しなさい（150 字以内）。
問３．下線部３を和訳しなさい（60 字以内）。
問４．下線部４は、神経心理学の領域でよく知られた理論です。本文に準拠して簡潔に説明しなさい。（100 字以内）。
問５．下線部５は、認知科学の領域でよく知られた情報処理モデルについて書かれた部分です。本文に準拠して簡潔に説明しなさい。（120 字以内）。
問６．下線部６は、心理学でよく知られている用語です。簡潔に説明しなさい。
（40 字以内）。
問７．下線部７は、近年失語症セラピーの領域で耳にするようになっています。あなたの知るところを簡潔に述べなさい。知識がない場合には、本文から類推して述べなさい。
（120 字以内）。

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