: lemmas or lemmata) is an abstract conceptual form of a word that has been mentally selected prior to the early stages of speech production.
[3] For example, there is some evidence to indicate that the grammatical gender of a noun is retrieved from the word's phonological form (the lexeme) rather than from the lemma.
[4] This can be explained by models that do not assume a distinct level between the semantic and the phonological stages (and so lack a lemma representation).
[5] Lexical selection experiments have provided evidence that lemma retrieval is affected by the frequency of the word.
[8] TOT utterances provide evidence that the lemmas and lexemes are separate processes in language activation.