Chapter 6 Language Processing in Mind

6.1 introduction

Why study language? ... LANGUAGE is a mirror of the mind in a deep

and significant sense. It is a product of human intelligence, created anew in
each individual by operations that lie far beyond the reach of will or
consciousness. (Chomsky, Reflections on Language, 1975) The study of
"language and mind" aims to model the workings of the mind in relation to
language. Since structures and connections in the mind are inevitably
unobservable, researchers put forward hypotheses based on fragmentary
clues. This accounts for the high degree of controversy which surrounds
almost all areas of the subject. The label most usually given to the study of
"language and mind" is psycholinguistics, a term which is often perceived as
being trendy. It has therefore been somewhat overused in recent years, and
can be found applied to just about any linguistic topic. PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
"proper" can perhaps be glossed as the storage, comprehension, production
and acquisition of language in any medium (Spoken or written).
Why study psycholinguistics? PSYCHOLINGUISTICS is concerned
primarily with investigating the psychological reality of linguistic structures.
Less modestly, it sometimes also produces findings which make their own
mark on linguistic research, leading to the modification of theoretical ideas.
If we view the task of psycholinguistics in the light of the general
paradigm of cognitive psychology, it becomes identified with the search for
behavioral manifestations of linguistic constructs. As psychology, in its modern
guise, uses an experimental methodology, it also follows that such behavioral
manifestations will be studied under experimental conditions, and it is
reasonable to see the last thirty years or so of psycholinguistics in terms of
the construction of ingenious laboratory techniques for pursuing this goal.
It

is

perhaps

useful

to

distinguish

psycholinguistics

from

the

PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE, which deals with more general topics such

as the

extent

PSYCHOLOGY

to

which

OF

language

shapes thought,

COMMUNICATION,

which

and

includes

from

the

non-verbal

communication such as gestures and facial expressions. A possible divide

within psycholinguistics is of those who style themselves COGNITIVE
PSYCHOLINGUISTS as opposed to EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLINGUISTS.
The form are concerned above all with making inferences about the content of
the human mind, Whereas the latter are somewhat more concerned with
empirical matters, such as speed of response to a particular word. In practice
the two schools often overlap, but extreme supporters of each way of thinking
sometimes perceive the gap as being a large one.
6.1.1 Evidence
Psycholinguistics

attracts

adherents

from

both

linguistics

and

psychology, though these often have somewhat different approaches,

particularly with regard to methodology. Linguists tend to favor descriptions of
spontaneous speech as their main source of evidence, whereas psychologists
mostly prefer experimental studies. This divide highlights the fact that
investigators face an unsolvable paradox: the more naturalistic a study, the
greater the number of uncontrolled variables; the more rigidly the situation is
controlled, the greater the likelihood that the responses obtained will be
untypical of real speech situations. Care must therefore be taken to approach
topics from different angles, in the hope that the results will coincide.
The subjects of psycholinguistic investigation are normal adults and
children on the one hand, and aphasics--people with speech disorders--on the
other. The primary assumption with regard to aphasic patient that a
breakdown in some part of language could lead to an understanding of which
components might be independent of others.
6.1.2 Current issues
In spite of the varied approaches found in modern psycholinguistics, a

number of general trends and crucial issues can be identified. A major point of
agreement among various researchers is that the human language system is
likely to be "modular", in the sense of being constituted out of a number of
separate but interacting components. A considerable amount of recent work
has attempted to elucidate this possible insight, although the number and
nature of these modules is far
from clear.
The realization that language organization is likely to be modular has,
however, led to a major controversy concerning the integration of the
modules, as to whether they remain separate with links between them, or lead
to an overall central organizer which contains more abstract representations.
For example, it is clear that at some level written and spoken representations
of words must be kept separate. One can therefore argue for an approach
which contains two separate lexicons, one for written speech, the other for
spoken, with links between them. On the other hand, one could suggest that
these separate lexicons lead ultimately to an abstract "master-lexicon" in
which differences between the various outputs are conflated. The issue is still
undecided. More recently, the question of "encapsulation" has become
dominant, the extent to which each module works automatically and
independently, with its content sealed off from that of other modules (Fodor
1983, 1985).
A further problem is the relationship between STRUCTURE and
PROCESS. It is generally agreed that the mind is likely to contain certain
linguistic structures which are utilized in the course of various "processes",
such as comprehending or producing speech. Some researchers have argued
that structures and processes are linked only indirectly, others that the
connection is a close one. This debate is often phrased in terms of the
relationship between a linguist's grammar and a human "grammar", and the
extent to which the former has PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY. Those who

believe that the relationship between structure and process is weak tend to
accept the idea that a linguist's grammar may have "psychological reality"
even though there is no way in which it seems to be directly used in the
processing of speech. Chomsky (1980) for example, has argued that any
model which represents the "best guess" as to the linguistic structures in the
mind must be regarded as "psychologically real" until superseded by a better
model, even though it has no relevance for comprehension or production.
Other researchers, however, have argued for a closer relationship between
structure and process, suggesting that linguists' grammars ought to have a
clear relationship to linguistic processing. This controversy is unlikely to be
solved in the near future.
The three major strands of psycholinguistic research are the
COMPREHENSION, PRODUCTION, and ACQUISITION language. That is,
(1) How do people use their knowledge of language, and how do they
understand what they hear or read? (2) How do they produce messages that
others can understand in turn? (3) How language is represented in the mind
and how language is acquired?
Owing to the space limitation, this chapter will mainly introduce the
processes of language comprehension and production.

6.2 Language Comprehension

Most of psycholinguistic research and theories are concerned with the
comprehension of text, but the assumption is that they are also relevant to
SPEECH COMPREHENSION. If we assume that the processes involved in
TEXT COMPREHENSION are by and large the same processes as those
involved in speech comprehension, then it should follow that those who have
good reading skills should also tend to have good speech comprehension
skills, whereas those who are poor at reading should also tend to be poor at
understanding speech. This does, in fact, seem to be the case.

Reading and speech comprehension both involve several processes. It

is important for the reader or listener to take account of the grammatical
structure and the meaning of what is being presented. Meaning is extracted
from text or speech by relating what is presented to information stored in longterm memory. There have been several attempts to explain how our previous
knowledge is applied to text and speech, and some of these attempts will be
discussed shortly.
6.2.1 Word recognition
An initial step in understanding any message is the RECOGNITION OF
WORDS. As we have seen, the meaning of a sentence is determined in part
from the meanings of the words in it. Additionally, the recognition of a word
provides information that determines the syntactic structure of the rest of the
sentence. For instance, identifying a word also identifies what category it is,
thus determining what range of phrase structures it can occur in. And when
we recognize a verb like put, as well as accessing its meaning, we also
expect certain types of complements to follow it; that is, it subcategorizes for
an object noun phrase and a locative phrase. When we hear the word arrive,
we know that it does not take an object. This kind of information is made
available to speakers by recognizing a word and accessing the information
that they have in their memory concerning it. Identifying words is such an
effortless task under most conditions that we don' t realize how difficult it really
is; designing a computer system to accomplish this task, for instance, has
proven virtually impossible. First recall the, sheer number of words that any
given person knows: the average six-year-old knows already about 14,000
words. A different kind of difficulty is presented by ambiguity,

where two

words with different meanings sound the same. Despite these difficulties, the
subjects are able to identify what they hear quite quickly. One source of
evidence that this is the case comes from "shadowing experiments" in which
people repeat aloud what they have just heard over a tape recorder. Ss can

fluently and accurately repeat what they have heard with a lag of considerably
less than a second. They cannot do this if what they hear is nonsense or a
foreign language.
How do we go about recognizing words then? One common sense view
that receives a lot of support from experimental evidence is that as soon as
people hear speech, they start narrowing down the possible words that they
may be hearing. If the first sound that they hear is /s/, that eliminates all words
beginning with other sounds; if the next sound is/p/, many other possibilities
are eliminated. A word is identified as soon as there is only one possibility left.
This account is referred to as the COHORT THEORY and hypothesizes that
auditory word recognition begins with the formation of a group of words at the
perception of the initial sound and proceeds sound by sound with the cohort of
words decreasing as more sounds are perceived. This theory can be
expanded to deal with written materials as welt. Several experiments have
supported this view of word recognition. One obvious prediction of this model
is that if the beginning sound or letter of a word is missing, recognition will be
much more difficult, perhaps even impossible. As early as 1900, experiments
showed that word recognition is much more impaired by the mispronunciation
of the initial letter of a word than by the mispronunciation of the final letter.
This suggests that this model is correct; if the end of the word is missing, it
can be predicted based on the initial portion, while it is much more difficult to
use the end to predict the early part of the word.
One of the most important factors that affects word recognition is how
frequently the word is used in a given discourse or context. This
FREQUENCY EFFECT describes the additional ease with which a word is
accessed due to its more frequent usage in the language. For example, words
like better or TV occur more often than debtor or mortgage. This effect is not
easy to explain assuming the beginning-to-end word recognition approach
sketched above. One possible explanation of the frequency effect is that the

lexicon is partially organized by frequency rather than simply in terms of the

sounds in beginning-to-end order.
People also recognize a word faster when they have just heard it or read
it than when they have not recently encountered it. Frequent words are likely
to have been encountered more recently than infrequent words, so it is
possible to explain the frequency effect as a recently effect and reduce the
number of separate effects that have to be explained. RECENCY EFFECTS
describe the additional ease with which a word is accessed due to its
repeated occurrence in the discourse or context. However, again, the recently
effect does not gibe with the simple beginning-to-end identification algorithm
sketched above.
Another factor that is involved in word recognition is COTEXT. People
recognize a word more readily when the preceding words provide an
appropriate context for it. For example, in the sentence This is the aorta,
people are not given any context that helps identify the word aorta. But in the
sentence The heart surgeon carefully cut into the wall of the right aorta, many
people would find that the cue of the heart surgeon helps them to identify the
word more quickly. One mechanism that has been proposed to account for
this kind of context effect is a SEMANTIC ASSOCIATION NETWORK. This
network represents the relationships between various semantically related
words. Word recognition is thought to be faster when other members of the
association network are provided in the discourse. It is obvious that the
meaning of a word is tied to our understanding and general knowledge of the
concept

to

which

it

refers.

Thus,

it

is

not

unreason-

able to suppose that hearing the words heart surgeon not only activates the
direct meaning of the words heart surgeon, but also makes a number of
associated concepts that are more available to the hearer, such as those
involved in the physiology of the heart, modern surgical procedures, and so
on. These concepts are in turn linked to the words that are used to refer to

them.
6.2.2 Lexical ambiguity
Much research has centered on how ambiguous words such as bug or
rose are understood. There are two main theories:

(1) all the meanings

associated with the word are accessed, and (2) only one meaning is accessed
initially. Support for the first position comes from experiments such as the
following. When people are asked to finish a sentence, they take longer when
the fragment to be finished contains an ambiguous word than when the
ambiguous word is replaced by an unambiguous term, as in the following
sentences:
ex. 6-1
a. After taking the right turn at the intersection..
( right is ambiguous: correct vs. rightward)
b. After taking the left turn at the intersection
(left is unambiguous)
What this delay suggests is that all meanings of ambiguous words are
accessed and that time has to be taken to decide among them.
However, other experiments suggest that under some circumstances,
only one meaning is initially accessed. Two of the effects mentioned above
have been shown to be important here: the frequency and context effects.
First, if one of the meanings is much more frequent than the other, people
tend to assume that the word has the more frequent meaning. The word chair,
for example, has at least two meanings--an object to sit on and the head of a
department or committee--but the former occurs much more often in speech
than the latter, and people often appear to recognize only the more frequent
meaning soon after the word chair is presented to them. This seems to
suggest that only one meaning is initially considered, at least for words whose
various meanings differ markedly in frequency of occurrence.
The semantic context effect also plays a significant part in which
meaning is the most appropriate. When a word like bug is seen in the context

of spy, it is reliably identified as meaning "a listening device"; but in the

context of spiders and roaches it is identified as meaning "an insect".
6. 2.3 Syntactic processing
Once a word has been identified, it is used to construct a syntactic
structure. In some cases this is quite straightforward. Psycholinguists
generally assume that the syntactic structure is built as soon as possible
rather than waiting to see what the whole string of words is before deciding
what structure it has. The reason for this assumption is that people normally
already know what the beginning of the sentence means before they hear the
whole thing; this must be the case given the common experience we all have
of being able to fill in a word that someone else we have been listening to is
groping for. The shadowing task mentioned earlier proves the same point.
Sometimes when people are shadowing, they mistake what they hear and say
a word that is not on the script that they are repeating aloud. This word is
generally syntactically and semantically reasonable given the context. If all
the words in a sentence are unambiguous or have only one possible category
and those categories fit only one phrase structure, it is not hard to understand
how people can build the correct structure and interpret it so quickly. For
example, in the jealous woman went away, the word the can only be a
determiner, woman is a noun, and the combination forms a noun phrase or
nominal word group; went is a past tense verb, away is a particle, and the
combination of the two makes a verb phrase; finally, the combination of a
noun phrase and a verb phrase makes a sentence. From this example there
is no reason to think that the process of determining the structure of a
sentence is difficult.
However, as always, there are complications due to the ambiguity of
individual words and to the different possible ways that words can be fit into
phrases. Sometimes there is no way to determine which structure and
meaning a sentence has. For example, there are two possible structures

associated with the sentence The cop saw the spy with the binoculars. The
ambiguity lies in how the prepositional phrase with the binoculars fits into the
rest of the sentence; it can be a complement of the verb see, in which case it
means that the cop employed binoculars in order to see the spy, or it can be
part of the noun phrase, in which case it specifies that the spy has binoculars.
Some ambiguities are due to the ambiguous category of some of the
words in the sentence. In the expression the desert trains, should desert be
taken as the subject of the verb trains, or is desert a modifier of the noun
trains ? If the sentence continues men to be hardy, the first structure is
correct, but if it continues seldom run on time, the latter is appropriate.
One interesting phenomenon concerning certain ambiguous sentences
is called the "garden path", GARDEN PATH sentences are sentences that are
initially interpreted with a different structure than they actually have. It typically
takes quite a long time to figure out what the other structure is if the first
choice turns out to be incorrect. Sometimes people never figure it out. They
have been "led up the garden path," fooled into thinking the sentence has a
different structure than it has. Reduced relative clauses quite frequently cause
this feeling of having been garden-pathed. For example, The horse raced
past the barn fell means "the horse that was raced past the barn fell," but
even when this is explained, many people have trouble figuring out how it fits
together.
As with lexical ambiguity, an important question in sentence processing
is how people decide which structure an ambiguous sentence has. The
alternatives are that people either consider all possibilities and decide which is
the best, or else they use some strategy to decide which structure to consider
first. If that structure does not work out, they may reconsider. This garden path
phenomenon suggests that for at least some ambiguities, people try one
analysis of an ambiguous sequence of words first, and only become aware of
the other possibility when the one tried first does not work out. In the example

above, people realize that there is something wrong with their initial analysis
of the sentence because fell cannot be fit into the structure that they have
settled on initially.
Several suggestions have been made about how people decide which
analysis to try first. One guess is that there is a strong tendency to build as
little structure as possible. For example, if the first word in sentence is the, an
infinite number of structures could potentially follow; the is a determiner and
unambiguously initiates a noun phrase, but that noun phrase can serve as a
subject of a sentence, as a possessive phrase modifying the subject noun, as
a possessive phrase modifying a possessive noun, etc. Because of recursion,
there are an infinite number of possibilities.
It would be inefficient for people to assume all these infinite structures
until they get some positive evidence for one of them. And if they arbitrarily
choose one of the possibilities, they are most likely to choose the simplest.
The idea is that people initially construct the simplest (or least complex)
syntactic structure when interpreting the structure of sentences. This is called
the MINIMAL ATTACHMENT THEORY.
There are other types of information that people can use to choose the
appropriate analysis for an ambiguous sentence as well. As with words, the
semantic interpretation sometimes determines which is the most likely
interpretation. Returning to the ambiguity above, it is equally likely that
someone can employ binoculars to see a spy or that a spy should have
binoculars. But if the word binoculars is replaced with him by Galileo, the
great Italian the word revolver, the situation changes. A spy with a revolver is
likely enough to be seen, but it isn't possible to see using a revolver.
Therefore, the choice between the possibilities can be made based on the
pragmatic plausibility of the two interpretations.
6.2.4 Semantics and sentence memory
One of the dearest demonstrations that memory representations are not

syntactic under certain conditions arises when we present subjects with short
stories, each of which contains a key sentence. At some point after the
subject hears this sentence. He is presented with a test sentence and has to
decide whether it is identical in all respects with any sentence he has heard in
the story. The test sentence is con- strutted in such a way as to bear one of a
number of relationships to the key sentence and, of course, on any trial
subject does not know which sentence in the story is the key sentence. To
illustrate, one story which has been used in this sort of study described the
invention of the telescope and included ex. 6-2a as its key sentence.
ex. 6-2a
Galileo, the great Italian scientist, sent a letter about it to him.
The last sentence, which could immediately follow the key sentence or
follow it after an interval of 60 or 120 syllables, could either be identical with
(a), related to (a) via PASSIVE, related to (a) via another syntactic rule not
involving any change in meaning, or related to (a) via switching the subject
and indirect object NPs--a switch which involves a marked change in
meaning. These last three possibilities are illustrated in (b)---(d).
b. A letter about it was sent to him by Galileo, the great Italian scientist.
c. Galileo, the great Italian scientist, sent him a letter about it.
d .He sent a letter about it to Galileo, the great Italian scientist.
The results of the study were that if the test sentence was presented
immediately after the key sentence, the subjects would recognize any change,
syntactic or semantic. After as little as 60 syllables, however, Ss were almost
as likely to respond that they had heard (b) or (c) in the story as they were to
respond positively to (a) itself, i.e. after this short period they were not capable
of recognizing syntactic changes which did not also involve a change of
meaning. For (d) subjects' performance was much more accurate and, even
after 120 syllables, they were detecting semantic changes with almost 100
percent accuracy. This seems to indicate that the syntactic details of linguistic

material are not usually stored for very long and that it is a representation of a
sentence's meaning which a subject has available in his memory under
normal circumstances. Note that this does not demand that syntactic details
have no role in memory. In fact, the results of this study are consistent with
such details being available to memory for a short time and it may be that
under certain conditions the experimentalist can gain access to this level of
representation. It is, perhaps, not insignificant that the present 'study uses
materials in structured story form, whereas most of the earlier memory studies
we have mentioned use sentences in isolation as stimuli.
Rather more interesting work than the above has taken place within the
framework of ASSIMILATION THEORY. This is a rather difficult position to
define but it differs from approaches using semantic features in its emphasis
on the importance of background knowledge in "normal" situations where we
might memorize linguistic material. There is evidence to indicate that, for
some levels of memory representation, this background knowledge
constitutes a necessary condition, i.e. without the knowledge the appropriate
representation cannot be set up. This evidence arises when subjects are
presented with structured texts and are instructed to comprehend them and
remember as much of their content as possible. The texts are chosen to
describe unlikely states of affairs but the lexical items and syntactic structures
they use are familiar enough. One group of subjects simply hear the text, a
second hear the text and are then shown a picture providing an appropriate
context for the text and a third group are shown the picture before they hear
the text. The results are quite spectacular, with the third group remembering
the content of the text much more fully than either of the other two, and this
would seem to require that subjects in this group managed to build up a level
of representation which they could use in this task. This level of
representation was denied by the first two groups, despite the familiarity with
the lexical items and syntax of the text.

Assimilation Theory has opened up new areas of memory research over

the last few years and it seems likely that it will direct investigation for some
time in the future. Its major weakness is that it has said little about the details
of semantic representations for sentences beyond the fact that such
representations must allow the processes briefly described here to take place.
In particular, it says nothing about the semantic representation of words and it
is self-evident that the understanding process involves "looking up" the
meanings of particular words in some sort of psychological dictionary or
lexicon.
6.2.5 Basic processes in reading
Eye movement. A useful way of investigating some of the processes
involved in reading is to study the EYE MOVEMENTS of people reading.
While we feel that our eyes move smoothly across a page of text, the reality is
quite different. Our eyes actually make a series of rapid movements known as
"saccades", and between saccades there are fixation periods lasting for
approximately 250 milliseconds. A point towards the beginning of a word is
usually fixated, and there is a distance of approximately eight letters or
spaces between successive fixations. While most fixations typically move
forwards in the text, around 10 or 15 % of them involve the eyes fixating an
earlier part of the text than the previous fixation. Of particular importance,
information is obtained from the text only during fixations and not at all during
saccades.
The perceptual span. How much information is extracted from a single
fixation? Various methods have been used to measure what is known as the
PERCEPTUAL SPAN, which is the range of letters from which useful
information is extracted. Not surprisingly, the perceptual span varies
depending on factors such as the size of the print, the complexity of the text,
and so on. It is typically the case, however, that the perceptual span
encompasses about three or four letters to the left of fixation and some fifteen

letters to the right of fixation. The opposite pattern is found in readers of

Hebrew, who read from right to left. What appears to be happening is that it is
more valuable to look ahead in the text rather than to look backwards to
words which have already been processed.
The fact that the perceptual span covers almost 20 letters means that
some of the letters included in it do not fall within the focal region of the eye,
which is the area of high acuity. What information is extracted from the area
lying outside the fovea? Fairly complex studies have revealed that meaning is
not extracted, but that information about the identity of the letters is obtained.
The immediacy assumption. At what point is meaning extracted from
the words in a text? The reader is supposed to carry out the processes
required to understand each word and its relationship to previous words in the
sentence as soon as that word is encountered; this is known as the
IMMEDIACY ASSUMPTION.
Carpenter and Daneman (1981) obtained some evidence consistent with
the immediacy assumption. They included the following two sentences in an
account of a fishing contest:
ex. 6-3
Tomorrow was the annual, one-day fishing contest and fishermen
would invade the place. Some of the best bass guitarists in the country would
come to this spot.
These sentences were written specifically to confuse the subjects. It is
natural to interpret bass as referring to a kind of fish, but the following word
guitarists makes it clear that the appropriate meaning of bass is its musical
one. Most readers fixated an unusually long time on the word guitarists, which
suggests that the ambiguity and its resolution were noticed almost
immediately.
There is other evidence which indicates that the immediacy assumption
is over-simplified. The fact that most readers sometimes move their eyes back

to earlier parts of a text suggests that the meaning of text is not always
extracted immediately. In addition, readers sometimes fixate the same word
more than once, which is contrary to the spirit of the immediacy assumption.
6.3 Discourse/text interpretations
Discourse serves as a context, affecting sentence and word-level
interpretation, tipping the interpretation of what would otherwise be
ambiguous words or phrases in a certain direction. For example, some
sentences can be interpreted literally (according to standard usage of the
words) or figuratively (by deviating from what we understand to be the
standard significance of the words for some special meaning or effect).
Context can prompt readers to engage in one or the other.
When we are trying to understand a sentence, we often make use of
information that is not contained directly within the sentence itself. This is
known as contextual information, and we can distinguish between two kinds of
context: general and specific. GENERAL CONTEXT EFFECTS occur when
our general knowledge about the world influences language comprehension.
SPECIFIC CONTEXT EFFECTS involve information obtained from earlier
parts of a discourse.
General context effects occur all the time, because a crucial aspect of
language comprehension involves making use of any relevant general
knowledge that we possess. This can be demonstrated at an anecdotal level.
When the author first visited the United States, he was baffled by the
commentaries on baseball games. He could understand each word and
sentence at some level, but Full comprehension was impossible because of
his imperfect knowledge of the rules of baseball.
Specific context effects can operate in a similar fashion, as was shown
by John Bransford and Marcia Johnson (1972). They gave their subjects the
passage in the panel below:
The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange items into

different groups. Of course one pile may be sufficient depending on how much
there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities, that is
the next step; otherwise, you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo
things. That is, it is better to do too few things at once rather than too many. In
the short run this may not seem important but complications can easily arise.
A mistake can be expensive as well. At first, the whole procedure will seem
complicated. Soon, however, it will become just another facet of life. It is
difficult to foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate
future, but then, one never can tell. After the procedure is completed one
arranges the materials into their appropriate places. Eventually, they will be
used once more and the whole cycle will then have to be repeated. However,
that is part of life.
Subjects who were given this passage on its own found it (as you
probably did) difficult to comprehend. Those who were provided with an
appropriate context in the form of the title, "Washing clothes", on the other
hand, found the same passage reasonably easy to understand.
6.3.1 Schemata and inference drawing
It is believed that SCHEMATA, meaning packets of stored knowledge,
play an important rote in language processing. The futures of schemata are
as follows:
(1) Schemata can vary considerably in the information they contain,
from
the very simple to the very complex.
(2) Schemata are frequently organized hierarchically; for example, in
addition to a rather general restaurant schema or script, we probably also
have more specific restaurant schemata for different kinds of restaurant
( e. g.
fast-food places, up-market French restaurants, and so on ).
(3) Schemata operate in a top-down or conceptually driven way to
facilitate interpretation of environmental stimuli.

There are various characteristics of language processing which

indicate the key role played by schematic and other stored knowledge. For
example, language comprehension frequently requires us to go far beyond
the literal meanings of the sentences we read or hear. Essential information is
often only implied, so that it is necessary to draw inferences in order to
understand fully what is intended. You might think that only rarely do
inferences need to be drawn to fill in the gaps in discourse. Consider the
following sentence: Three turtles rested on a floating log, and a fish swam
beneath them. Most of us would use our stored knowledge of spatial
relationships to draw the inference that the fish swam beneath the log as well
as beneath the three turtles. This sort of inference is drawn so effortlessly that
we are generally unaware that we have drawn an inference at all.
How do we know that someone has drawn a particular inference?
According to Bransford, Barclay, and Franks (1972), the inferences which
people draw are stored in long-term memory along with information about the
sentences actually presented. As a result, they will sometimes mistakenly
believe on a subsequent memory test that they previously heard or saw an
inference. Bransford et al. (1972) presented their subjects with sentences
such as the one above about the fish and the turtles. Later on, they were
given a test of recognition memory. Subjects were confident that they had
previously been presented with sentences which they had actually heard
before (i. e. Three turtles rested on a floating log, and a fish swam beneath
them ). They were equally confident, however, that they had heard sentences
which involved an inference from what they had heard (e. g. Three turtles
rested on a floating log, and a fish swam beneath it, although in the actual
sentence, the fish swam beneath them ). This indicates that spontaneous
spatial inferences are made.
No complete theory of what is involved in inference drawing is available.
However, schemata or scripts presumably play a part. In discussion of

schemata, we believe that some of the errors observed in memory seem to

reflect the use of schemata. For example, people made use of a restaurant
schema or script to understand a story about Jack eating out at a restaurant.
Subsequently, they falsely recognized sentences fitting into the schema but
not actually included in the story (e. g. Jack sat down at the table. ). Schemata
thus lead people to draw schema-relevant inferences which facilitate
comprehension but which may impair memory.
An important theoretical issue is whether schematic knowledge is
always used at the time of comprehension and storage or whether it is
sometimes used at the time of retrieval. So far as inferences are concerned,
there is reasonably strong evidence that many of them are drawn during the
comprehension process. For example, in a study the length of time that the
eyes fixated on the various words in a text was measured. The fixation time
on a word (e. g. knife ) was less if the same word had been presented before
than if a general word had been used earlier in the text (e. g. knife rather than
weapon ). Presumably this happened because it took the subjects some time
to work out that a knife was the weapon referred to previously. This long
fixation of knife following weapon did not occur, however, if the reference to
weapon had included sufficient information for the reader to make the
inference that the weapon was indeed a knife. The implication is that the
inference was drawn during comprehension of the word weapon.
There is also evidence that retrieval processes can be systematically
affected by prior knowledge in the form of schemata. Anderson and Pichert
(1978) asked subjects to read a story about a house from the perspective of a
prospective buyer or of a prospective burglar. After the subjects had recalled
the story, they were then asked to recall the story again on the basis of the
alternative perspective. The key finding was that subjects recalled more
information relevant to the alternative perspective on the second recall than
on the first, presumably because the relevant schemata guided the recall

process. As one of the subjects reported: "When he gave me the homebuyer

perspective, I remembered the end of the story, you know, about the leak in
the roof. The first lime through I knew there was an ending, but I couldn't
remember what it was. But it just popped into my mind when I thought about
the story from the homebuyer perspective" (Anderson and Pichert, 1978:10).
6.3.2 Story structure
Our comprehension of and memory for stories are highly "selective'', in
the sense that we focus on the central theme of the story rather than on the
relatively unimportant details. This was. demonstrated convincingly by
Gomulicki (1956). He asked one group of subjects to write a summary of a
story that was visible in front of them. He asked a second group to read the
story and then to recall it from memory. The third group of subjects were
shown the summaries and the recalls, and were generally unable to tell which
were which. These findings indicate that what is extracted from a story and
then remembered closely resembles a summary in its emphasis on the main
theme of that story.
Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) have proposed a theory of story processing.
They argued that a story is first of all processed so that the individual
propositions (i. e. assertions that may be true or false) are extracted.
Evidence that propositions play a major role in sentence comprehension
was obtained by Kintsch (1973). They presented sentences which contained
approximately the same number of words, but which varied in terms of the
number of propositions. For example, the sentence, Cleopatra' s downfall lay
in her foolish trust of the fickle political figures of the Roman world, contains
twice as many propositions as the sentence,

Romulus,

the legendary

founder of Rome, took the women of the Sabine by force. Kintsch (1973)
discovered that reading time for such sentences increased by approximately
one second for each additional proposition.
According to van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), the propositions of a story

enter into a short-term working buffer of limited capacity, which is similar to the
working memory system. The working memory is termed as a combined
temporary memory and mental work space in which recent stimuli are briefly
held, either for rehearsal and recall or for meaningful integration with other
knowledge. When the buffer contains a number of propositions, the reader or
listener tries to relate them to each other in a coherent fashion. In general
terms, subsequent ability to remember the propositions depends on the length
of time they spend in the working buffer. Those propositions which are highly
relevant to the main theme of a story tend to be stored for a relatively long
time in the working buffer. The reason is that such propositions are generally
well connected to other propositions in the buffer, -and so retaining them in
the buffer facilitates the task of making coherent sense of the story. It follows
from these theoretical assumptions that thematic information should be better
remembered than non-thematic information.
Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) argued that there were additional processes
involved in the task of understanding the gist or MACROSTRUCTURE of a
story. More specifically, they claimed that readers or listeners make extensive
use of their general knowledge to work out the major theme of a story. This
leads to the production of MACROPROPOSITIONS,

which are general

propositions used to form an overall macrostructure of the story. There are

substantial differences in the kinds of knowledge that individual people can
bring to bear on story understanding. As a result, the way in which the working
buffer is used and the story macrostructure which is formed will also differ
from one person to the next. The theory proposed by van Dijk and Kintsch
(1983), even though it has enhanced our understanding of story processing,
suffers from the limitation that it is not precisely enough formulated to account
in detail for such individual differences.

6.4 Language production

More is known about language comprehension than about language

production. This is perhaps because it is generally easier for an experimenter
to exercise control over the comprehension material than to constrain a
subject's language production. Furthermore, language production cannot be
considered purely from the perspective of a theory of language. LANGUAGE
PRODUCTION is very definitely a goal-directed activity, in the sense that
people speak and write in order to make friends, influence people, convey
information, and so on.
The two forms of language production considered in this section are
speech production and writing. Speech production has been investigated
more thoroughly than writing, but the reasons for this are not clear.
6.4.1 Speech production
The usual approach in cognitive psychology is to set the subject a task,
and then to assess how accurately or efficiently that task has been performed.
This approach doesn't work, however, when we are investigating speech
production. If we tell our subjects what we want them to say, then the
spontaneity of normal speech is completely lost. If, on the other hand, we
leave our subjects free to say whatever they like on a given topic, then we
have very little experimental control over what is said. One approach is to ask
people to speak on a particular topic, and to make a tape recording of what
they say. Another, more useful approach is to ask people to make a collection
of the speech errors which they make in everyday speech.
At a theoretical level, a promising start has been made by Garrett(1976;
1984). He argued that producing speech is a much more complex matter than
it might appear to be from our everyday experience. According to his model,
there are altogether five different levels of representation involved in speaking
a sentence, and they occur in the following sequence:
(1) The message-level representation: this is an abstract, prelinguistic representation of the idea or ideas that the speaker wants to

communicate.
(2) The functional-level representation: this is an outline of the
proposed utterance having grammatical structure; in other words, the
slots for nouns, adjectives, and so on are allocated, but there are no
actual words to fill the slots.
(3) The positional-level representation: this differs from the
functional level representation in that it incorporates the words of the
sentence that is to be produced.
(4) The phonetic-level representation: of the necessary information
about the ways the intended sentence are pronounced.
(5) The articulatory-level representation: this is the final
representation, and contains a set of instructions for articulating the
words in the sentence in the correct order.
This complex theory of speech production has not as yet been tested
thoroughly. However, there is support for some of its major assumptions. In
essence, Garret ( 1984 ) claimed that the speaker engages in reasonably
elaborate planning before beginning to speak. One way of testing this notion
is to consider the sorts of error that people make while talking. If, for example,
sounds or words from the end of a sentence intrude into the early part of a
sentence, then this provides evidence for the notion of forward planning. The
classic error of this type is the SPOONERISM (or SLIP OF THE TONGUE),
where the initial letter or letters of two words are transposed.
Other errors also demonstrate the existence of forward planning. An
ANTICIPATION ERROR occurs when a word is spoken earlier in the
sentence than it should be (e. g. The school is at school. ) A similar type of
error is the EXCHANGE ERROR, in which two items within a sentence are
swapped (e. g. This is the happiest life of my day. )
In general terms, the demands of speech production are so great that
production of speech and planning for the next utterance are difficult to

combine satisfactorily. Pauses are used in an attempt to ease these

processing demands, but even with pauses, spontaneous speech is usually
characterized by a variety of errors. The position is rather different when
people have prepared the content (but not the wording) of what they intend to
say (e.g. before a public lecture). Such prepared speech exhibits many fewer
grammatical and stylistic errors than does spontaneous speech.
According to Garrett (1976; 1984 ), speakers decide on the grammatical
structure of a proposed utterance in the functional-level representation, and
then select the appropriate words to fit into that structure in the subsequent
position-level representation. Given this sequence, it would be possible for the
grammatical structure of a spoken sentence to be correct even though some
of the words were incorrectly positioned. Precisely this is found with
MORPHEME-EXCHANGE ERRORS, in which the roots or basic forms of two
words are switched leaving the grammatical structure unchanged (e. g. He
has already trunked two packs. )
Why is human speech production so prone to error? According to Dell
(1986), it is the price we pay for having such a flexible speech- production
system. Its flexibility has the great advantage of allowing us to produce novel
sentences. Indeed, most speech errors involve novelty, but simply novelty of
an unwanted kind. If we had a very rigid speech-production system, it might
prevent errors from occurring, but we would suffer the disadvantage of very
stereotyped utterances.
6.4.2 Written language
Written language differs from spoken language in a number of ways.
The hesitations, grammatical errors, and interchanges of words characteristic
of spoken language are largely, or entirely, absent from written language. It
should therefore come as no surprise to discover that theories of the
processes involved in writing differ significantly from those put forward to
explain speech production.

One of the most detailed theories of the writing process was proposed
by Hayes and Flower ( 1986 ). According to them, writing essentially consists
of three inter-related processes:
( 1 ) The planning process, which involves producing ideas and
arranging them into a writing plan appropriate to the writer ' s goals.
( 2 ) The sentence generation process, which translates writing plan
into actual sentences that can be written down.
( 3 ) The revision process, which involves an evaluation what has
been written so far; this evaluation can encompass individual words at
one extreme or the overall structure of the writing at the other
extreme.
In general, the processes operate in the order: planning, sentence
generation, and revision; however it is quite common for the writer to return to
the planning process after several sentences have been generated and
revised, especially with longer pieces of writing.
Writing plans are obviously much influenced by the relevant knowledge
that the writer possesses about the topic to be written about. Another less
obvious factor determining the quality of the writing plan is STRATEGIC
KNOWLEDGE, which is knowledge of the methods used in constructing a
writing plan in order to make it coherent and well-organized. Children often
lack such strategic knowledge--they tend to make use of a KNOWLEDGETELLING STRATEGY, where they simply write down everything they can
think of that is relevant to a topic without organizing the information in any way
(Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1987). Skilled writers, in contrast, possess
strategic knowledge, which enables them to make use of a KNOWLEDGETRANSFORMING STRATEGY. This involves focusing on potential problems
within the planning process (e. g. "Are the main points arranged in the most
logical order?").
The writing plan constructed during the planning process is generally

much shorter and sketchier than the written story or essay itself. Kaufer,
Hayes, and Flower (1986) asked writers to write down an outline of their
essays corresponding to the writing plan. They discovered that the
subsequent essay was always at least eight times longer than the outline.
Kaufer et al.

(1986) discovered that expert writers produced larger

sentence fragments than less skilled writers: 11.2 words versus 7.3 words on
average. However, the similarities outweighed the differences. Both groups of
writers wrote down approximately 75 % of the sentence fragments they
produced in their verbal protocols. They also found that when sentence parts
were altered, it was almost always the last part to be produced that was
altered. One of the interesting and perhaps surprising findings about the
revision process is that expert writers typically spend longer than non-expert
writers on revision. There are two main reasons for this. First, expert writers
are more skilled at detecting errors that require revision. For example, in a
study by Hayes and others (1985), expert writers detected approximately 60%
more problems in a writers. Second, expert writers tend to focus on the overall
coherence and structure of what has been written, whereas non-expert writers
concentrate more on individual words and phrases. It takes much more time
to change the structure of a piece of writing than simply to alter some of the
words.
How adequate is the theoretical approach to writing advocated by Hayes
and Flower (1986)? On the positive side, they have been reasonably
successful in identifying some of the major differences between strategies
used by expert and non-expert writers. This is of value in terms of suggesting
ways in which poor writers could improve their writing skills.
Probably the major limitation of their approach is the emphasis they
place on verbal protocols i.e. the spoken thoughts of writers engaged in
writing. While there may be conscious awareness of many of the process
involved in sentence generation and revision, it seems probable that much of

the planning process occurs below the conscious level and thus cannot be
verbalized.

Further Reading
Aitchison, J.1990. Language and Mind: Psycholinguistics, in N. E. Collinge
( ed. ) An Encyclopaedia of Language, Routledge, 333-370.
Aitchison,

J.1998.

The

Articulate

Mammal:

An

Introduction

to

Psycholinguistics. Routledge.
Carrol, D.V. 1994/1999. Psychology of Language ( 2nd edition).Monterey, CA:
Brooks/Cole Publishing Co
Dijkstra, T & De Smelt, K. (Eds.)1996. Computational Psycholinguistics.
London: Taylor & Francis Ltd, 3-23
Eysenck, M. W. 1993. Principles of Cognitive Psychology. LEA, Hillsdale, 102130.
Foss, D., & Hakes, D. 1978. Psycholinguistics : An Introduction to the
Psychology of Language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 61 - 229.
Garman, Mi. 1990. Psycholinguistics . Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Gleason, J.B. 1998. Psycholinguistics (second edition ). Harcourt Brace
College Publishers, 1 - 150, 223 - 339 and 409 - 435.
Harley, T. 1995. The Psychology of Language: From Data to Theory. East
Sussex: Erlbaup (UK) Taylor & Francis, 31- 100, 139 - 174 and 207 - 277.
Kess, J. F. 1992. Psycholinguistics: Psychology, Linguistics and the Study of
Natural Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 29 - 222.
Steinberg, D.D. 1993. An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. London: Longman,
5- 132.
2000