Accessing the mental lexicon

The utterances that we produce and understand may be either single-word or multi-word in their structure. In this chapter we shall consider the sorts of processes that may be involved in accessing our mental lexicon, in both single- and multi-word utterance types, and both in speech and writing as well as in production and comprehension. In the first section, we consider what sorts of language forms may be stored as entries in our mental lexicon (5.1.2), and consider some general issues in lexical access (5.1.3). We then outline the form that lexical entries may take (5.2.1–5.2.2) and review some of the major experimental findings on lexical access (5.2.3). Sections 5.3 to 5.5 review some representative models of lexical access, highlighting the salient differences between serial and parallel types of processing. One of the longeststanding issues in the field of visual word recognition concerns the role of individual letter perception vs holistic word form perception in word recognition; in this context, we consider the status of units that are both larger than individual letters and smaller than words (5.6.1). Apart from the units of perception and production, we need to consider the role of context in lexical access (5.6.2). We also review the evidence on the status of stems vs affixes in lexical access (5.6.3). Finally, we draw some conclusions (5.7).