Lexical Access in Speech Production

The mental lexicon, the dictionary of word representations in the brain, is the central structure from which we can build language, and it is the primary access point when planning speech for production. Not surprisingly then, the investigation of how the mental lexicon is structured and accessed is a longstanding topic in the study of language production. In this chapter, we will give a brief overview of two traditional questions concerning the nature of the mental lexicon: (1) What are the temporal dynamics of lexical access? (2) How is the mental lexicon organized spatially? These two questions relate back to the historical debates on serial versus interactive lexical access, and modular versus distributed organization. We will discuss some of the dominant psycholinguistic models at the core of these debates and describe the key evidence supporting (or not) one account from another. Then we will go into the implementation of the serial versus interactive models at the level of the brain and report some influential evidence on the spatiotemporal dynamics of lexical access. Finally, we will conclude with some more recent models and data, in particular the notion of parallel and predictive models of lexical access, and how these novel ideas have reshaped the manner to conceptualise the mental lexicon.