Difficulty in Lexical Access: The Lexical Bar

Abstract

What features do some words have that make them more ‘difficult’ than others? In Chapter 4, I used the phrase ‘difficult in access’ to refer to specialist words extracted by the G-L Instrument. Chapters 5 and 7 also mentioned features that can make these words ‘difficult in access’ relative to other words. This chapter looks more closely at some of the features that appear more often in specialist G-L words as a group, features that may make the words more difficult for some language users than for others. None of these features belongs solely to specialist G-L words, but they tend to exhibit these features much more than other words, and this tendency interferes with word learning and use.