ACCESS CODE
المؤلف:
John Field
المصدر:
Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P1
2025-07-21
488
ACCESS CODE
The form in which spoken or written material is submitted to the lexicon (vocabulary store) for a word match.
With written language, the notion of an access code is especially associated with search models. These assume that the words in our minds are grouped in sets rather like dictionaries. The sight of the letters ALO would open up a set which included ALOFT– ALONE– ALONG– ALOUD, and the reader would work through the set until a match was found for the word on the page. Such a search would be cumbersome when a set consisted of all the words beginning with a prefix such as PRE- or UN-. So one theory (Taft, 1979) proposes that the access code for readers is the first syllable of a word’s root. This unit is said to form the word’s basic orthographic syllable structure or BOSS. In the case of prefixed words, the prefix is stripped off before any lexical search takes place. Thus, the BOSS of unhappy is HAP- and of international is NA-. However, the BOSS hypothesis faces serious problems in accounting for pseudo-affixes (Does one have to strip off dis- in dismay?), bound roots (What does-sist mean in insist, persist?) and Ambi syllabicity (Is the BOSS for lemon LEM- or LE-?).
With speech, one theory holds that it is the stressed syllables in English that trigger a word search. So the access code for alTERnative would be (or commence with) TER. This again overcomes the problem of prefixes of high frequency and low saliency. However, there is also evidence that, during the search, the access code does not distinguish between stressed and unstressed syllables. The code for pairs such as FOREbear and forBEAR appears to be the same since the listener appears to process them as if they were homonyms.
See also: Morphology: storage, Phonological representation, Word primitive
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