Access to the Internal Lexicon

In order to understand how a word is read for meaning, we need to know how a reader proceeds from the printed representation of a word to the word’s entry in the reader’s internal lexicon, where the word’s meaning is stored. This raises two principal questions: what is the code in which the word is represented when this process, lexical access, is being carried out, and what is the procedure by which this representation is used to find the word’s entry in the lexicon. The lexical-decision task is a suitable one for the investigation of these questions. Two experiments using this task are reported. In one, it was found that a letter string’s similarity to English words influenced the “no” response latency, but…