ABSTRACT
An essential part in the process of comprehending a written sentence is the task of accessing the meaning of the words the sentence is composed of. The reader must associate a portion of the sensory input with a stored lexical representation. This chapter evaluates various proposals about what might constitute the input representation, here termed the access representation, that is used to mediate the sensory-to-lexical association process. The main focus is on those proposals that claim that partial information about the written word can serve as the initial input representation for access purposes.
