LEXICAL ACCESS IN SPEECH PRODUCTION: A BRIEF LITERATURE REVIEW

Speaking involves conveying thoughts and concepts into words, To accomplish this process, speakers need to select, from their mental lexicon, the most appropriate lexical items to match their communicative intentions. This is what is often referred to as lexical access, According to several theories of speech production, there seems to be an agreement on the fact that lexical access involves two major stages: lemma retrieval and word-forni encoding, In this paper, we focus on lemma retrieval arid discuss (1) the two different views on the selection of lexical items decompositional and non-decompositional, (2) the cognitive mechanisms underlying the selection of words, (3) mainstream research on L1 lexical access and, (4) current evidence of L2 lexical access research. The article is structured as follows. First, we give an overview of the general functional architecture of the speech production system. Second, we present the overall picture emerging from theories of lexical access, particularly the non-decompositirinal and the deconipositional approaches and the cognitive mechanisms underlying lemma retrieval, Third, studies on LI lexical access research are reported and discussed. Then, the main findings concerning lexical access in L2 are presented. Finally, based on the literature reviewed, we refcr,to some of the current intriguing issues regarding lexical access, more specifically, lemma retrieval.