ABSTRACT
Language comprehension involves retrieving from the mental lexicon the meanings associated with words a reader or listener comes across. Access to word meanings or lexical semantics is one of the major goals of the word recognition process, and it is these meanings that are the building blocks for construction of sentence and utterance level representations. For reading, it is traditionally assumed that lexical semantics can be accessed in two ways. One is by a direct visual access route, where visual features in the input are projected onto underlying orthographic representations, whose activation leads to the activation of stored lexical semantic properties. The other is by a phonologically mediated process, where the orthographic input first activates lexical phonological representations and then semantic representations.
