ACCESSING WORDS IN SPEECH PRODUCTION - STAGES, PROCESSES AND REPRESENTATIONS

This paper introduces a special issue of Cognition on lexical access i n speech production. Over the last quarter century, the psycholinguist ic study of speaking, and in particular of accessing words in speech, received a major new impetus from the analysis of speech errors, dysfl uencies and hesitations, from aphasiology, and from new paradigms in r eaction time research. The emerging theoretical picture partitions the accessing process into two subprocesses, the selection of an appropri ate lexical item (a ''lemma'') from the mental lexicon, and the phonol ogical encoding of that item, that is, the computation of a phonetic p rogram for the item in the context of utterance. These two theoretical domains are successively introduced by outlining some core issues tha t have been or still have to be addressed. The final section discusses the controversial question whether phonological encoding can affect l exical selection. This partitioning is also followed in this special i ssue as a whole. There are, first, four papers on lexical selection, t hen three papers on phonological encoding, and finally one on the inte raction between selection and phonological encoding.