Lexical access in speech production

Lexical access is the process by which the information needed for word production is retrieved from the mental dictionary. In the course of lexical access speakers need (a) to choose the one word, from the thousands in the lexicon, that best conveys the intended meaning, and (b) to retrieve the information necessary for incorporating the word in a given context. This information is of two sorts: syntactic and phonological. The thesis presents three series of experiments. A first series of experiments examines the mechanisms responsible for choosing the intended word. A second series of experiments investigates how syntactic information is retrieved and used to select words such as articles, whose production depends on the prior selection of syntactic information. A third series of experiments focuses on the retrieval of word syllables and phonemes. The results of the experiments presented here help characterize the mechanisms of lexical selection in word production.