Attention and Structural Choice in Sentence Production

This chapter offers a review of experimental evidence about the role of the speaker’s attention in the choice of syntactic structure and the corresponding word order during sentence production. Here, we describe how the speaker’s syntactic choices reflect the regular mapping mechanism that reflects the features of the described event in the produced sentence. One of the most important event parameters that the speaker considers is the changing salience status of the event’s referents. This chapter summarizes current theoretical debate about the interplay between attention and sentence production mechanisms. Finally, it reviews the corresponding experimental evidence from languages with both restricted and flexible word orders.

Visual Word Recognition in Multilinguals

This chapter on the reading of words by multilinguals considers how retrieving words in two or more languages is affected by the lexical properties of the words, the sentence context in which they occur, and the language to which they belong. Reaction time and event-related potential (ERP) studies are discussed that investigate the processing of cognates, interlingual homographs, and words with different numbers of neighbors, both in isolation and in sentence context. After reviewing different models for multilingual word retrieval, it is concluded that multilingual word recognition involves a language-independent, context-sensitive, and interactive pattern recognition routine, with temporal properties that can be determined not only by “classical” reaction time techniques, but even better by up-to-date research techniques such as eye-tracking and ERP recordings.

Lexical Ambiguity

This chapter on lexical ambiguity examines how words with multiple meanings are learned, stored, and processed. Lexical ambiguity is ubiquitous: over 80% of common English words have more than one dictionary entry, with some words having very many different definitions. Being able to learn and process ambiguous words is therefore critical for skilled language comprehension. This chapter reviews experiments that indicate that ambiguous words can be relatively challenging to learn, and that the competition between alternative word meanings can delay processing of these words relative to unambiguous words. However, when ambiguous words occur within sentences readers/listeners can rapidly use contextual cues to select the most likely meaning, and if necessary reinterpret the sentence in the light of subsequent information. The chapter also reviews evidence from brain imaging studies that reveals the network of temporal and frontal brain regions that are known to be important for representing and processing ambiguous words.

From Thought to Action

Written language is unlike other language components, in that reading and spelling are evolutionarily recent skills (i.e. human inventions that entered our repertoire only a few thousand years ago and have become widespread in the global population only in the past 100 years). Whereas reading has received considerable interest in psycholinguistics, written language production has been the “neglected” language modality, even though in this age of written electronic communication via email, texting, messaging, and so on, increasing numbers of people are processing written language as much or more than spoken language. In this chapter, we review some of the central issues in the psycholinguistics of single word written language production with the goal of providing the reader with an understanding of the cognitive and neural bases of this vital component of our language expertise.

Cross-Linguistic/Bilingual Language Production

The bilingual population nowadays represents a global majority. Hence, the need of elaborating comprehensive theories of lexical access reflecting this reality is becoming increasingly relevant. This chapter presents a critical overview of the most prominent psycholinguistic models of bilingual language production and it tackles different theoretical issues that are currently controversial in the field. The first one concerns whether bilingual lexical access is competitive. Does competition occur between nodes in all of a speaker’s languages, or only between nodes in the target language? A second issue concerns the nature of the mechanisms applied during lexical access (i.e. is language selection resolved through domain-general or language-specific mechanisms?). If bilingual lexical access is competitive and language-non-specific, do the current theories account for the data or do we need to update them? This chapter tries to answer these questions by providing the most recent evidence on mechanisms of bilingual language production.

Bilingual Sentence Processing

Bilinguals live, by definition, in two linguistic worlds. Given the different demands of each language, one might think that each system functions independently. However, several studies have found that bilinguals’ two languages are interdependent to a great extent. Data is presented that confirms the interdependence between the two languages in bilinguals. Studies are reviewed that reveal how, in both the semantic and syntactic domains, bilinguals almost always use a unitary mechanism that accesses two separately represented grammars. Finally, the data reveal intricate patterns of grammatical processing that confirms Grosjean’s view that a “bilingual is not two monolinguals in one head.” Implications of the findings in the literature regarding this view are discussed.

Visual Word Recognition

Learning to read is arguably the most important aspect of a child’s schooling, and provides the key means to obtaining new knowledge into adulthood. Yet, unlike human capacity for spoken language, reading is not a universal part of human experience. Instead, reading is a relatively recent cultural invention, acquired only through years of instruction and practice. Understanding the functional mechanisms that underpin this astonishing form of expertise is a central aim of modern psycholinguistics, and has been a question of interest since the beginnings of psychology as a scientific discipline. This chapter considers how we identify a printed letter string as a unique word and compute its meaning, focusing in particular on evidence gathered from the analysis of behavior. It identifies the most important emerging questions and describes areas in which neuroscience methods may make a substantive contribution.

Connectionist Principles in Theories of Speech Production

This chapter focuses on connectionist modeling in language production, highlighting how core principles of connectionism provide coverage for empirical observations about representation and selection at the phonological, lexical, and sentence levels. The first section focuses on the connectionist principles of localist representations and spreading activation. It discusses how these two principles have motivated classic models of speech production and shows how they cover results of the picture-word interference paradigm, the mixed error effect, and aphasic naming errors. The second section focuses on how newer connectionist models incorporate the principles of learning and distributed representations through discussion of syntactic priming, cumulative semantic interference, sequencing errors, phonological blends, and code-switching.

Sentence Level Aphasia

Sentences convey aspects of meaning, such as thematic roles, that are critical to the power of language as an instrument of thought and communication. These aspects of meaning are determined by the syntactic structure of a sentence. People with aphasia often have difficulty producing and/or understanding sentences. Most of the research into these disorders focuses on their abilities to construct syntactic structures, which have been shown to be impaired in both production and comprehension. This chapter reviews the major manifestations of these disorders, accounts of the processing abnormalities that produce them, and the location of lesions that are associated with them. It reviews the two major manifestations of disorders of syntactic production—agrammatism and paragrammatism—and discusses the leading models of the deficits that underlie these disorders.

Role of Gesture in Language Processing

Use of language in face-to-face context is multimodal. Production and perception of speech take place in the context of visual articulators such as lips, face, or hand gestures which convey relevant information to what is expressed in speech at different levels of language. While lips convey information at the phonological level, gestures contribute to semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic information, as well as to discourse cohesion. This chapter overviews recent findings showing that speech and gesture (e.g. a drinking gesture as someone says, “Would you like a drink?”) interact during production and comprehension of language at the behavioral, cognitive, and neural levels. Implications of these findings for current psycholinguistic theories and how they can be expanded to consider the multimodal context of language processing are discussed.