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Lexical access

المؤلف:  Paul Warren

المصدر:  Introducing Psycholinguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P130

2025-11-06

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Lexical access

The selection process discussed above simply refers to the decision that what we have heard is word-form rather than word-form. But word forms or lexemes are linked to lemma-based content information, e.g. the meaning of the word, its grammatical type noun, verb, etc., and so on. Lexical access is used here to refer to the point at which this lexically stored information becomes available. Note though that there is some ambiguity in the use of the term access’, since it is sometimes used to mean the point at which lexical entries are first contacted. To an extent this ambiguity is understandable, because in many models of recognition contact and access amount to the same thing. That is, such models argue that as soon as a word-form has been contacted, all of the information associated with that word becomes available.

 Lexical access clearly occurs before the selection of a unique candidate word. This is demonstrated in the priming experiment referred to above (Zwitserlood, 1989). Participants were able to respond more rapidly to both the test targets ship and money when they had heard the onset fragment /kæp/ of the test prime captain than when they had heard an equivalent amount of a control prime. The explanation for this is that the onset fragment allows the listener to make contact with lexical representations for both captain and capital, with consequent access to the semantic con tent of these representations. Without such access, priming of the related words ship and money would be difficult to explain.