We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
from PART 2 - Processes and models
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Introduction
Preview
In this chapter, we are concerned with the processing that is involved in our understanding of utterances. Now, ‘utterances’ can be of many different kinds, ranging from marginally linguistic vocalisations of emotions, through social gambits and stereotypes, to lexical elements (which may appear as single-word utterances) and structured grammatical sequences. The concept ‘utterance’ is thus a pretheoretical one, which will defy any attempt to provide an all-embracing characterisation in terms of linguistic properties. We shall, however, characterise it for our purposes here as any signal-based implementation of the abstract language system. This provides for written as well as spoken utterances, but excludes covert use of language as in silent verbal reasoning.
In the preceding chapter, we have examined some issues in lexical access, in a way that has not really considered the role of words in (single- or multi-word) utterances: for it is one thing to gaze at letter arrays flashed briefly on a screen, in order to pronounce them, or decide whether they constitute a word, etc., but quite another matter for us to read words in written utterances. And so also for speech perception in artificial situations vs listening to utterances for their communicative potential. In this chapter, we shall attempt to review what is known about processing linguistic utterances, of the multi-word type, since they afford us evidence of lexical and structural processing proceeding in some relationship to each other (see Scholes 1978; Cutler 1983).
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
