Spoken word access processes: An introduction

We introduce the papers in this special issue by summarising the current ma jor issues in spoken word recognition. We argue that a full understanding o f the process of lexical access during speech comprehension will depend on resolving several key representational issues: what is the form of the repr esentations used for lexical access; how is phonological information coded in the mental lexicon; and how is the morphological and semantic informatio n about each word stored? We then discuss a number of distinct access proce sses: competition between lexical hypotheses; the computation of goodness-o f-fit between the signal and stored lexical knowledge; segmentation of cont inuous speech; whether the lexicon influences prelexical processing through feedback; and the relationship of form-based processing to the processes r esponsible for deriving an interpretation of a complete utterance. We concl ude that further progress may well be made by swapping ideas among the diff erent sub-domains of the discipline.