HOW MANY LEVELS OF PROCESSING ARE THERE IN LEXICAL ACCESS

The patterns of semantic errors in speaking and writing are used to co nstrain claims about the structure of lexical access mechanisms in spe ech and written language production. It is argued that it is not neces sary to postulate a modality-neutral level of lexical representation ( lemma) that is intermediate between lexical-semantic representations a nd modality-specific lexical representations. A dual-stage access mode l is proposed in which the first stage involves the selection of seman tically and syntactically specified, modality-specific lexical forms, and the second stage involves the selection of specific phonological ( orthographic) content for the selected lexemes.