Abstract: In the studies of speech production, there are different views, whole-word representation or decomposed-morphological representation, of compounds in lexical access. By either word frequency effect or morpheme frequency effect, findings from Dutch studies suggest the Discrete Stage Theory and its decomposed-morphological representation hypothesis, while findings from Chinese and English studies suggest the Independent Network Model and its whole-word representation hypothesis. The article further suggests, upon literature reviewing, that lexical representation might be conceptually different from mental lexicon. Language difference, processing paradigms, and modalities all likely contribute to the difference of the representation of compound words.

Key words: speech production, compound, morpheme, decomposed-morphological representation, whole-word representation