Word for word: Multiple lexical access in speech production

It is quite normal for us to produce one or two million word tokens every y ear. Speaking is a dear occupation and producing words is at the core of it . Still, producing even a single word is a highly complex affair. Recently, Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999) reviewed their theory of lexical access in speech production, which dissects the word-producing mechanism as a stag ed application of various dedicated operations. The present paper begins by presenting a bird eye's view of this mechanism. We then square the complex ity by asking how speakers control multiple access in generating simple utt erances such as a table and a chair. In particular, we address two issues. The first one concerns dependency: Do temporally contiguous access procedur es interact in any way, or do they run in modular fashion? The second issue concerns temporal alignment: How much temporal overlap of processing does the system tolerate in accessing multiple content words, such as table and chair? Results from picture-word interference and eye tracking experiments provide evidence for restricted cases of dependency as well as for constrai nts on the temporal alignment of access procedures.