THE RELATION BETWEEN SYNTACTIC AND PHONOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE IN LEXICAL ACCESS - EVIDENCE FROM THE TIP-OF-THE-TONGUE PHENOMENON

The relation between access to the syntactic and to the phonological f eatures of words in lexical access is investigated in two experiments, Italian speakers were asked to provide the gender and partial phonolo gical information of known nouns they could not produce at that moment , words that they felt were at the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT). In both ex periments, subjects were able to provide information about the word th ey could not produce with better-than-chance accuracy. This was true n ot only for phonological information such as the initial phoneme of th e word but also for the word's gender - a purely syntactic feature of nouns. However, analyses of the correlation between correct retrieval of the gender and the initial phoneme failed to reveal a positive rela tionship, This result is inconsistent with theories of lexical access that interpose two lexical nodes, lemma and lexeme nodes, between a wo rd's semantic and phonological content. A model of lexical access that does not postulate the lemma/lexeme distinction is briefly discussed. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.