A case for the lemma/lexeme distinction in models of speaking: comment on Caramazza and Miozzo (1997)

In a recent series of papers, Caramazza and Miozzo [Caramazza, A., 1997. Ho w many levels of processing are there in lexical access? Cognitive Neuropsy chology 14, 177-208; Caramazza, A., Miozzo, M., 1997. The relation between syntactic and phonological knowledge in lexical access: evidence from the ' tip-of-the-tongue' phenomenon. Cognition 64, 309-343; Miozzo, M., Caramazza , A., 1997. On knowing the auxiliary of a verb that cannot be named: eviden ce for the independence of grammatical and phonological aspects of lexical knowledge. Journal of Cognitive Neuropsychology 9, 160-166] argued against the lemma/lexeme distinction made in many models of lexical access in speak ing, including our network model [Roelofs, A., 1992. A spreading-activation theory of lemma retrieval in speaking. Cognition 42, 107-142; Levelt, W.J. M., Roelofs, A., Meyer, A.S., 1998. A theory of lexical access in speech pr oduction. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, (in press)]. Their case was based on the observations that grammatical class deficits of brain-damaged patien ts and semantic errors may be restricted to either spoken or written forms and that the grammatical gender of a word and information about its form ca n be independently available in tip-of-the-tongue stales (TOTs). In this pa per, we argue that though our model is about speaking, not taking position on writing, extensions to writing are possible that are compatible with the evidence from aphasia and speech errors. Furthermore, our model does not p redict a dependency between gender and form retrieval in TOTs. Finally, we argue that Caramazza and Miozzo have not accounted for important parts of t he evidence motivating the lemma/lexeme distinction, such as word frequency effects in homophone production, the strict ordering of gender and pho nem e access in LRP data, and the chronometric and speech error evidence for th e production of complex morphology. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All righ ts reserved.