The process of language comprehension; an approach to examining issues in cognition and language

Abstract

The fundamental concerns of the field of cognitive psychology-understanding the nature of the mental representation of information and the processes which operate on those representations-have received their most extensive examination in the past decade in the field of psycholinguistics. The reasons for this are obvious: language is a relatively accessible domain for study, and the systematic classification and observation brought by linguistics and philosophy to language provided a major initial stepping stone for the investigation of the psychological functions underlying human language production and comprehension. And, while there has been much growth in a number of other fields in the area of cognition, the now-expanded domain of psycholinguistics still represents one of the most promising and profitable areas for examining cognitive function. It appears likely that major breakthroughs in understanding the extent of (and constraints on) our ability to perceive, process, store, recall and comprehend information will come from gaining a detailed empirical understanding of the nature of language processing. It is particularly important in this regard to underscore the point that language, like other cognitive functions, is a (dynamic) process. It is, in fact, precisely because it is a process that gaining an understanding of its nature has proved so intractable o4er the years; such an enterprise requires that we rely on more than just an examination of the end-state characteristics of the process (such as memory representations) or static models of its putative underlying structure. Rather, if we are to achieve any substantive understanding of language performance it is necessary that we examine the microstructure of the entire process as it occurs in real time. It is only through the careful examination of the temporal course of mental operations involved in the various levels of analysis underlying speech that we can hope to discover its nature. There are a number of critical questions underlying the examination of language as a process which must be answered in the coming years. The first, and in one sense most fundamental, concerns the basic nature of the integra-