Alfonso Carramaza, Ph.D.  

Daniel and Amy Starch Professor of Psychology                                                                            

Harvard University

Lexical representation and access: The indispensable contribution from neuropsychology

How is knowledge of words – their form, their meaning, their grammatical properties – organized and represented in the mind/brain?  The received view in psycholinguistics draws a distinction between a modality-neutral level of lexical representation (lemma) that is intermediate between lexical-semantic representations and a modality-specific lexical representation (Lexeme). I review evidence from disorders of lexical processing that are problematic for this theory and propose an alternative that dispenses with the lemma level of representation. This alternative model assumes that the first stage of lexical access involves the selection of semantically and syntactically specified modality-specific lexical forms (lexemes) followed by a second stage that involves the selection of specific phonological or orthographic content for the selected lexemes.