ABSTRACT
A basic skill of speakers is the access of words in memory. In producing utterances, speakers call on many facets of their stored knowledge about words, including their meaning, syntactic properties, morphological composition, and sound structure. Lexical access is the process by which this information about words is retrieved from memory in order to map a lexical concept onto an articulatory program. The access consists of two major steps: lemma retrieval and word-form encoding (cf., Levelt, 1989; but see Caramazza, 1997). In lemma retrieval, a lexical concept is used to retrieve the lemma of a corresponding word from memory. A lemma, as the term is used in this chapter, is a memory representation of the syntactic properties of a word, crucial for its use in sentences (Roelofs, 1992a, 1993). For example, the lemma of the Dutch word sigaar (cigar) says that it is a noun and that its grammatical gender is non-neuter. In word-form encoding, the lemma is used to retrieve the morpho-phonological properties of the word from memory in order to construct an articulatory program. For example, for sigaar the morpheme <sigaar> and the segments /s/, /i/, /ɣ/, /a/, and /r/ are retrieved and a phonetic plan for [si.ˡɣar] is generated.
