ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on language comprehension, a final section reviews language production. The author begins with speech perception, examining the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the processing of phones and phonemes. Many forms of phonological recoding are possible. In pre-access recoding, one recodes the letters of a written word into phonological representations, which then access words, just as in speech perception. Orthographic information does not access words directly but only serves to activate the phonemes that do. Post-access phonological representations play important roles in language comprehension. Phonological representations in working memory appear central to integrating the words in a sentence. Because phonological representations are relatively long-lasting, words from a sentence can be represented simultaneously after their visual processing has ended, thereby allowing their meanings to be integrated. Language production has generally received less attention than language comprehension. To develop a theory of language production, early theorists utilized an empirical methodology that was particularly clever and opportunistic.
