... conceptual and pre-linguistic process. Secondly, speakers must select appropriate words from their mental lexicon and combine them according to the rules of the language. The lexical retrieval of a single word involves a number of steps: The retrieval of its meaning and grammatical properties (e.g., whether it is a noun or a verb), the retrieval of its morphological form (where two morphemes would be retrieved for a word such as "walk+ed") and the retrieval of its phonological form (the consonants and vowels the word consists of). Most theories of language production assume that only conceptual processes are capacity demanding (i.e. they require the speaker's attention), whereas lexical access is a fairly automatic process (Levelt, 1989). The processes involved in lexical access are often assumed to run "in the background," while the speaker's attention is focused on planning the utterance contents. There is some evidence for this view from analyses of ...

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