Abstract

A discussion of modularity in language production processes, with special emphasis on processes for retrieving words and building syntactic structures for a to-be-uttered sentence, is presented. The authors’ 1st goal was to assess the extent to which information processing is encapsulated between different processing stages. In particular, they assessed whether the input from one processing stage to the next is minimal and whether the flow of information in the system is strictly unidirectional. On the basis of the reviewed evidence, they conclude that both assumptions have to be revised. Their 2nd goal was to propose an alternative framework that does not assume strict encapsulation but that maintains multiple levels of integration for production. During the past 20 years a “great divide ” (as Boland & Cutler, 1996, p. 309, labeled it) has characterized the psycholinguistic world: Can the processes engaged during comprehension and production of language be conceived of as modular or not? Whereas a number of influential theories that do not assume a modular system have been put forward in the comprehension domain (e.g., MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; Tabor

Citations