AbstractAll words of the languages we know are stored in the mental lexicon. Psycholinguistic models describe in which format lexical knowledge is stored and how it is accessed when needed for language use. The present article summarizes key findings in spoken‐word recognition by humans and describes how models of spoken‐word recognition account for them. Although current models of spoken‐word recognition differ considerably in the details of implementation, there is general consensus among them on at least three aspects: multiple word candidates are activated in parallel as a word is being heard, activation of word candidates varies with the degree of match between the speech signal and stored lexical representations, and activated candidate words compete for recognition. No consensus has been reached on other aspects such as the flow of information between different processing levels, and the format of stored prelexical and lexical representations. WIREs Cogn Sci 2012, 3:387–401. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1178This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Computational Models of Language