STAGES OF LEXICAL ACCESS IN LANGUAGE PRODUCTION

We describe two primary stages in the top-down process of lexical acce ss in production, a stage of lemma access in which words are retrieved as syntactic-semantic entities, and a stage of phonological access in which the forms of the words are fleshed out. We suggest a reconcilia tion of modular and interactive accounts of these stages whereby modul arity is traceable to the action of discrete linguistic rule systems, but interaction arises in the lexical network on which these rules ope rate. We also discuss the time-course of lexical access in multi-word utterances. We report some initial production priming explorations tha t support the hypothesis that lemmas are buffered in longer utterances before they are phonologically specified. Because such techniques pro vide a relatively direct way of assessing activation at the primary st ages of lexical access they are an important new resource for the stud y of language production.