ABSTRACT
What are the modules of linguistic information processing, what does each do, and how? Answers to these three questions would constitute a substantial contribution to the theory of mental processes, a decipher ment of extraordinary glamour indeed. Alas, such a contribution will not be forthcoming in this paper, although we do hope to put some constraints on the form of such a theory and to demonstrate that some kinds of answers to these questions are more plausible than others. The questions presuppose that the information processing system as it applies to linguis tic materials has a modular structure: That is, that there are certain under lying perceptual and cognitive mechanisms which can be distinguished functionally and structurally (Foss & Fay, 1975; Marr, 1976). It is plausi ble and even likely that the components interact in important ways. Dur ing the course of investigating the structure of these linguistic processing mechanisms, we will appeal to data concerning the actual units of percep tion developed while processing running speech. To the extent that we can identify such units we are also identifying some of the functions being computed by the modules (and thus, indirectly, the modules themselves).
