Cognitive reality and the phonological lexicon: A review

Abstract

What are phonological entries in the mental lexicon like? On the basis of rational argumentation, many phonologists believe them to be parsimonious articulatory specifications. I will review the neuroscience literature relating to phonological representation in the mental lexicon and the possible role of articulatory representations, and argue: (1) That there are probably not distinct mental lexicons for speech perception and production; (2) that entries in the lexicon are very probably auditory, and improbably articulatory; (3) that articulatory recoding takes place for certain difficult phonological tasks that possibly do not arise in normal speaking, such as phoneme monitoring and same/different judgements; (4) that the arguments from speech perception studies for articulatory representations in the lexicon are, furthermore, empirically weak, because a number of additional arguments from phonetics and phonology suggest that auditory classifications in some cases make more sense than articulatory ones.