Competitor Effects During Lexical Access: Chasing Zipf's Tail: Ellen Bard and Richard Shillcock

Background Discussions of lexical access, whether for heard or read words, now generally accept that a number of lexical candidates compete for recognition during a process which ultimately yields a single word percept. There is some doubt, however, about which words compete, and what the basis for competition is. This paper shows that a single mechanism may account for apparently contradictory results which have been used to support a number of different models of lexical access.