Language and the Brain: A Twofold Study of Language Production and Language Comprehension as a Separate or Integrated Set of Processes

Abstract

Humans can understand their language due to the processes in the brain. It is very easy for language users to presume that language production and language comprehension are two simple phenomena. For psycholinguistics, these two processes are part of the three core topics in the study of the language and the mind. Psycholinguistics attempt to have a model that explains how language is processed in our brain. It is nearly impossible to do or think about anything without using language, whether this entails following a set of written instructions or an internal talk-through by your inner voice. Language permeates our brains and our lives like no other skill. Beforehand, psycholinguists described our comprehension and production of language in terms of the rules that were hypothesized by linguists (Fodor, Bever, & Garrett, 1974). Now, that is not the case. These linguistic rules inform rather than taking precedent in studying language and the brain. This paper aims to describe the brain regions/structures, language processes, and the intricate connections between them. The study discusses the brain as the underlying basis of the relationship between language and the brain. Moreover, this study descriptively analyses some of the recent expositive psycholinguistic research on language production and comprehension in order to understand the nature and dynamics of language. The methodology of this paper has to do with the research design, materials and concludes with descriptive analyses of the major finding from the secondary data reviewed in the paper. The linguistic approaches used for this study do not entail any sort of calculation or enumeration. It takes the form of a descriptive qualitative approach or a desktop study where research work mainly capitalizes on preexisting literature in the research domain. The study's main finding reveals that research works on language processing treat production and comprehension as quite distinct from each other. Language production processes differ fundamentally from comprehension processes in many respects. However, other researchers reject such a dichotomy. In its place, they propose that producing and understanding are tightly interwoven, and this interweaving underlies people’s ability to predict themselves and each other.