The what and when of word retrieval in spoken language production

Semantically driven lexical access in spoken language production is the process of transposing a communicative intention into phono-articulatory codes. At each stage of processing, fromlexical-semantic retrieval through to phono-articulatory processing,more representations are active than are minimally necessary to produce the target word. In recognition of that fact, research over the past three decades has been driven by a (putative) need to answer a core question:How is conflict resolved at the lexical level? The 'standard view' involves some form of the idea that selection of the target word is governed by a stochastic process implemented via a biased competitionmechanism, with the nature of the 'bias' differing quite widely across proposals.Here we argue that the standard view is out of synchrony with a range of findings; interestingly, and as a matter of historical precedent, a number of those findings pre-date the earliest formulations of the standard view. Stepping back, we arg...