 The flip side of informational encapsulation is inaccessibility to central monitoring. A system is inaccessible in this sense if the intermediate-level representations that it computes prior to producing its output are inaccessible to consciousness, and hence unavailable for explicit report. In effect, centrally inaccessible systems are those whose internal processing is opaque to introspection. Though the outputs of such systems may be phenomenologically salient, their precursor states are not. Speech comprehension, for example, likely involves the successive elaboration of myriad representations (of various types: phonological, lexical, syntactic, etc.) of the stimulus, but of these only the final product—the representation of the meaning of what was said—is consciously available.