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Lexical Access
One of the major questions in psycholinguistics has been how language production
and comprehension are related. Both processes need to rapidly and accurately retrieve
words from a mental lexicon estimated to include 45,000 entries. However, most research
on lexical access has focused on either production or comprehension, while assuming that a
single lexicon is shared by both. One of the lines of my research (Cutting, 1997) examines this assumption, exploring the
structure of the lexicon with respect to which kinds of lexical information are shared and
which are distinct. The experiments use a modified version of the negative priming
technique to isolate production and comprehension processes. On the prime trial, speakers
view two words and are cued to produce one while ignoring the other. The produced word
is comprehended and produced, but the ignored word is only comprehended. The probe
trial is a production task in which speakers name a picture. I am examining how different
types of lexical information (meaning, syntactic, and word form) influence priming from
the produced and ignored primes on picture naming. The preliminary results suggest that
lexical-conceptual representations are shared by both production and comprehension, while
word-form representations are distinct.
Another issue in models of lexical access concerns when different types of lexical
information are accessed. Traditional models of language production have proposed a
modular two-stage process of lexical access in which meaning representations (semantic
processing) are completely accessed prior to word-form representations (phonological
processing). However, recent models have suggested that these two stages may overlap,
proceeding in cascade. In collaboration with Victor Ferreira, I have been examining lexical
access during production (Cutting & Ferreira, 1996). Using a picture word interference
task, in which speakers name a picture while ignoring an auditory distractor word, we
found support for the cascading view. We used pictures of objects with homophone names
(Ferreira & Cutting, 1996) like "ball." The important finding was that when speakers
heard a distractor word that was semantically related to the non-depicted meaning of the
homophone picture name (e.g., "dance," which is related to the formal dance meaning of
ball), speakers named the pictures faster. The critical feature of this result is that the
distractor word "dance" is semantically related to the depicted "ball" name via a shared
word form representation. The distractor words' facilitation of naming implies that
phonological and semantic processing overlap, supporting the cascading view. Using a
similar task we hope to further develop our model by exploring the issue of feedback
between different types of lexical information during access.
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