Taking the hit: Leaving some lexical competition to be resolved post-lexically

Natural variations in word pronunciation are not noise but information. Duration, prosodic prominence, vowel centralisation, and phonological reduction or assimilation can indicate whether a word stands alone or forms part of an utterance, whether it lies at the boundary of a major prosodic unit, is predictable in its context, or refers to a Given or a New entity. Though this variation is related to high-level factors, most discussions of lexical access seem to assume that lower level processes—acousticphonetic processing, phonological representation in the mental lexicon, and lexical effects on phonological representations of input—simply overcome variations in natural pronunciation, assuring that the correct word is accessed and ultimately selected, with no shortfall in the process that demands the participation of higher level information. Many of the papers in this volume deal with the architectural detail of this view. This paper summarises work on spontaneous unscripted speech, where variations most naturally occur, which shows why any such approach is counterproductive.