ABSTRACT
As Cutler (2005) observed, productive language processing in many respects mirrors receptive processing. In production, the speaker or writer begins with a message to be conveyed, and the process of production involves putting the message into an appropriate physical
form: speech or writing (or sign language – although that is beyond the scope of this book). The listener or reader, in contrast, begins with uncertainty about the message and must ‘unscramble’ the visual or auditory signal to build (or recover) the message (see Figure 6.1). As with the receptive models of reading and listening, there is a good deal of shared ground between process models of speech and writing, so the following paragraphs will consider both together.
