At the same time, on-line comprehension measures have documented just how powerful predictive processes are. The idea that speech perception and word recognition involve ‘top-down’ anticipation is not new, but these ideas have been recently formalized in information-theoretic accounts. In the following section, we introduce the P-chain, which is our characterization of an emerging computational framework in psycholinguistics, a framework that reconnects production, comprehension and acquisition.Īs we comprehend, we generate expectations about upcoming material at multiple linguistic levels-anticipated meanings, prosody, words and sounds. This is not because of a renewed interest in grammar, but instead owing to the development of computational-often connectionist-models that specify the mutual influences among these psycholinguistic components. Production, comprehension and acquisition researchers have increasingly more to say to one another. Our impression is that, over the last 10–15 years, psycholinguistics has regained the unity that it lost after the classical period. The lemma was hardly ever discussed in research on comprehension or acquisition. For example, in production, many experiments investigated the nature of the ‘lemma’, a hypothesized lexical representation that is more closely linked to grammatical than to phonological representations (for a review, see ). But production, comprehension and acquisition drifted apart, each component focusing on internal issues.
The 1980s and 1990s saw vigorous research on a number of issues, such as lexical and structural ambiguity, and rule versus network accounts of morphology and reading. As a result, psycholinguistics lost its unifying theme. The classical period ended when the field concluded that performance data did not mesh well with the then current grammatical theory. In this respect, there was a fundamental unity among the components of psycholinguistics. The search for the psychological reality of linguistic notions in performance data was not limited to production comprehension and acquisition research were carried out for the same reason. For example, pauses during speaking were collected to see whether deep- and surface-structure clause boundaries were reflected in the pause durations and distribution. When psycholinguistics was in its classical period (the 1960s and 1970s), the purpose of production research was to reveal the grammatical structure of language. To conclude, we consider the ramifications of the model for an understanding of production disorders.
This article describes the role of these processes, first by introducing a psycholinguistic framework that we call the P-chain, and then by reviewing a model of sentence production that reflects that framework. Despite this imbalance, production research is playing an increasingly central role in psycholinguistic theory, because production-like processes are now seen as important for understanding comprehension and acquisition, and even linguistic theory. In the Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics, 16 chapters are devoted to comprehension processes, six to acquisition and only three to production. Language production is the least studied of the three components of psycholinguistics-acquisition, comprehension and production.
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