Lexical access in Chinese speech comprehension and production.

This paper offers a description of Chinese speech comprehension and production processes that demonstrates why the word is the unit of lexical access-the Lexical Unit-in Chinese natural speech. It is argued that an access model which posits the morpheme as the Lexical Unit would be unlikely, as it must assume for Chinese either a real-time morpheme combination algorithm (i.e., an on-line grammar that takes morphemes as basic combinatory units) or an improbable lexical processing mechanism in which morphemes are identified as the first step in accessing precompiled words. Copyright 1999 Academic Press.