ABSTRACT
Functionally speaking, language has two modes: production and comprehension, both in their primary (speaking and speech perception) and secondary (writing and reading) modalities. Perception and production are intimately linked in the normal language user: Every speaker is a listener, and vice versa. It is surprising that, in psycholinguistic research, the two modes of language use have been studied in street separation for a long time. The reasons for this are manifold (see MacKay, Allport, Prinz, & Scheerer, 1987). It is due, in part, to a Cartesian philosophical tradition that treated action as inferior to perception, and the study of language production has always been the poor cousin. Language comprehension is a fully established research area with its own questions and methods, whereas the upsurge of experimental studies on the processes involved in production is of a more recent date. But the separation is not as strict as it seems because research into one language mode frequently relies on the subjects’ smooth performance in the other. Much research on word recognition uses pronunciation or naming (i.e., the speaking out loud of a stimulus word) as a measure of comprehension processes. Conversely, word-production studies using the picture-word paradigm rely on the influence on production processes of stimuli that are presented for comprehension. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to study aspects of language performance under the unified view of one system for language use.
