This paper addresses two issues concerning lexical access in connected speech recognition: 1) the nature of the pre-lexical representation used to initiate lexical lookup 2) the points at which lexical look-up is triggered off this representation. The results of an experiment are reported which was designed to evaluate a number of access strategies proposed in the literature in conjunction with several plausible pre-lexical representations of the speech input. The experiment also extends previous work by utilising a dictionary database containing a realistic rather than illustrative English vocabulary. make unrealistic and overly-optimistic assumptions concerning the size and diversity of candidates.
