ABSTRACT
It is not entirely transparent where a theory of phonology should fit in within a psycholinguistic theory of language production. Following Levelt (1989) and Wheeldon and Lahiri (1997), if we accept that the planning process is incremental and the linguistic unit of consequence is a “phonological word” (which is often larger than a syntactic word, incorporating content words with clitics), we need to ask whether the internal structure of such a unit is relevant in a psycholinguistic model. If we assume that linguistic theory is a theory of the underlying knowledge of native speakers, and if we also assume that a general theory of language embodies a system of representations as well as a system of well-formedness principles, rules, and constraints, then a precise phonological characterisation should be relevant for language production. The goal of a theory of language production is to account for how linguistic knowledge is mentally represented, accessed, and ultimately produced. Since the goal of phonological theory is to provide a characterisation of the sound structures found in the languages of the world, valid linguistic generalisations must play a role in constructing a psycholinguistic theory of production. The aim of this chapter is to provide an outline of the crosslinguistic generalisations made in phonological theory concerning the structure of the phonological system of a language, representations, and process. When appropriate we have made direct reference to what consequences phonological generalisations may have for a psycholinguistic model, particularly in the context of incremental planning as assumed in Levelt (1989).
