ABSTRACT
The mechanisms underlying sentence production include a number of complex, highly integrated processes. Contemporary models of sentence production place these processes in a largely serial, top-down architecture that proceeds from the speaker's communicative intention to overt speech (Bock & Levett, 1994; Garrett, 1975, 1980, 1982, 1988; Levelt 1993, 1999). At each level in the model, distinct data sets are examined and certain rules operate in order to construct utterances that convey specific messages that conform to the grammar. The result is a system that is putatively modular, not only in that language processes are separate from general cognitive processes (Fodor, 1983), but also in that there are distinguishable modules within the sentence production system itself.
