In psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...

 lexicalisation is the process of going from meaning

Meaning (linguistics)

In linguistics, meaning is what is expressed by the writer or speaker, and what is conveyed to the reader or listener, provided that they talk about the same thing . In other words if the object and the name of the object and the concepts in their head are the same...

 to sound

Sound

Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.-Propagation of...

 in speech production.

The most widely accepted model, speech production

Speech production

Speech production is the process by which spoken words are selected to be produced, have their phonetics formulated and then finally are articulated by the motor system in the vocal apparatus...

, in which an underlying concept is converted into a word

Word

In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...

, is at least a two-stage process. First, the semantic

Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....

 form (which is specified for meaning) is converted into a lemma

Lemma (psycholinguistics)

In psycholinguistics, a lemma is an abstract conceptual form of a word that has been mentally selected for utterance in the early stages of speech production...

, which is an abstract form specified for semantic and syntactic

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

 information (how a word can be used in a sentence), but not for phonological

Phonology

Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...

 information (how a word is pronounced). The next stage is the lexeme

Lexeme

A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as RUN...

, which is phonologically specified.

Some recent work has challenged this model, suggesting for example that there is no lemma stage, and that syntactic information is retrieved in the semantic and phonological stages.