Lexical involvement in naming does not contravene prelexical phonology: comment on Sebastián-Gallés (1991).

ABSTRACT

N. Sebastián-Gallés (1991) showed lexical involvement in naming Spanish. Her results were purported to be a failure to substantiate claims for prelexical phonology that characterize Serbo-Croatian. Summaries of several experimental demonstrations of lexical involvement in naming Serbo-Croatian are used to show that such results are only interpretable consistently in a model that assumes prelexical phonology. The lexicon is accessed through assembled phonology, but assembled and lexical phonology interact in resolving a unique pronunciation when several pronunciations are assembled and in assigning stress, which is not assembled. The authors argue that lexical access need not be different in different orthographies but that the weights on connections between orthographic and phonological substructures established through covariant learning will distinguish orthographies in the rate and degree of phonological involvement in word recognition.