Chapter 13 - Architecture of the language processing system

Summary

PREVIEW

This chapter provides both a retrospective view over the material in the book as a whole and an opportunity to see some of the links between the various components of the language production and comprehension systems that have been presented. It also looks at the links between the language system and other knowledge systems. By the end of the chapter you should have a better understanding of, amongst other things:

• the relationship between the production and comprehension processes, particularly with reference to lexical processing;

• the relationship between visual and spoken language processing;

• the notion that there may be processing modules responsible for specific types of linguistic processing;

• the fact that researchers take differing views on the relationships of such modules to one another and to non-linguistic processing.

Introduction

The preceding chapters of this book have presented an overview of key aspects of language processing in connection with a number of areas of language structure. For example, there have been chapters on the construction of sentences during production, on the selection of words for output, and on the morphological and phonological construction of words. There have been chapters on spoken word recognition, on visual word recognition and on the processing of sentences during comprehension. On occasion, links have been made between these chapters and between the findings discussed within them. In the current chapter, we will look briefly at the relationships between these component parts of language processing, as well as the relationship between language processing and other cognitive activities. The purpose is to provide a preliminary sketch of the architecture of the language processing system, and to indicate some of the connections that exist between some of the component parts.