The mental and neural representation of names: A cognitive and economic point of view

Reszegi, Katalin (2020) The mental and neural representation of names: A cognitive and economic point of view. In: The Economy in Names: Values, Branding and Globalization. University of Uppsala. (In Press)

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Abstract

Interest in the study of proper names is a relatively late phenomenon in the fields of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. By now, however, a significant number of studies have been conducted related to this word group indicating that the category of proper names is also not unified in itself, even though it exhibits certain special features compared to common nouns. The neural aspects and psycholinguistic attributes of larger name types, personal names, place names, and brand names reveal differences. Brand names seem to have a special neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic status: they appear to be located in the mental space between common nouns and personal names, in the mental lexicon. Moreover, emotional and graphic information are also central in the mental representation of the elements of this name category. It was also found, however, that the two main types of brand names – coined brand names and common word brand names – are represented and processed differently in the mind. In my paper, after providing an overview of the key lessons learned from these experimental results, I present a semantic theory, the functional-cognitive model of meaning that enables us to interpret these differences. I also outline how we may describe the meaning of the different types of proper names in this model. Taking into account the complex mental representation of names, we may also interpret the functioning of names (especially but not exclusively brand names) as economic devices, while also noting that different name types show differences in this respect.

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