Spoken word access processes : an introduction

James M. McQueen, Anne Cutler

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticle

    35 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    We introduce the papers in this special issue by summarising the current major issues in spoken word recognition. We argue that a full understanding of the process of lexical access during speech comprehension will depend on resolving several key representational issues: what is the form of the representations used for lexical access; how is phonological information coded in the mental lexicon; and how is the morphological and semantic information about each word stored? We then discuss a number of distinct access processes: competition between lexical hypotheses; the computation of goodness-of-fit between the signal and stored lexical knowledge; segmentation of continuous speech; whether the lexicon influences prelexical processing through feedback; and the relationship of form-based processing to the processes responsible for deriving an interpretation of a complete utterance. We conclude that further progress may well be made by swapping ideas among the different sub-domains of the discipline.
    Original languageEnglish
    JournalLanguage and cognitive processes
    Publication statusPublished - 2001

    Keywords

    • cognitive psychology
    • language & linguistics
    • neuropsychology
    • speech disorders
    • speech perception

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