Auditory word recognition. The mental processes which operate during the recognition of spoken words will be examined. Topics in the auditory word recognition will include: the multiple activation of lexical hypotheses and the competition between them; modulation of lexical activation by phonetic information; segmentation of continuous speech into words; and whether lexical form and meaning representations are distinct. We will also ask questions about the mapping of the speech signal onto the lexicon. Do prelexical representations mediate between the signal and the lexicon? How do listeners deal with the variability in speech? What is the nature of the information flow in the recognition system (e.g., is there feedback and/or cascade)?

Spoken word production. Spoken word production involves the cognitive processes underlying the generation of spoken words, ranging from intention to articulation. Models of spoken word production often divide the word generation process into conceptualizing, lemma retrieval, word-form encoding, and articulation, with word-form encoding further divided into morphological encoding, phonological encoding, and phonetic encoding. Moreover, models assume a process of self-monitoring, which serves to ensure that word planning and articulation are consistent with intent. In the production lectures we will discuss evidence on these processes from response time, error, eyetracking, electrophysiological, neuropsychological, functional neuroimaging, tractographic, and computational modeling studies.

Visual word recognition . How do we recognise words during reading? In student-led seminars we will first discuss prelexical issues (e.g., early stages of visual processing, the role of eye movements in reading, the nature of access representations). We will then discuss lexical issues (e.g., how word recognition is influenced by word frequency and the lexical neighborhood of words, the segmentation of morphologically complex words). We will ask whether current computational models of reading can capture the complexity of the data.

The mental lexicon. During the course we will also explore the relationships among spoken word production, auditory word recognition and visual word recognition. We will consider (a) the issues that recur whenever lexical processing is examined (e.g., the time course of processing, the role of frequency, the balance between storage and computation, and the role of context); and (b) the ways in which differences in the nature of the tasks involved in speaking words, listening to them, and reading them impose different constraints on the mental processes underlying those three abilities. We will discuss these questions as the course progresses, in particular during the student-led seminars on visual word recognition and in a final student-led discussion at the end of the course.