FLL Department of English Psycholinguistics 3rd Year 2024-2025
Language Processing
What happens in the human mind when we speak/read/write/ listen?
What are the processes and mechanisms underlying this complex activity?
Language processing involves two main activities: language production and language
understanding/comprehension.
Language production (what is going on from thought to output, to the actual production of a sound
wave)
Language Comprehension (a complementary activity to speech production) It is not just perception,
it is also how we interpret what is being said to us, how we analyse the linguistic units (words).
1) Language Production
Language production is logically divided into four major steps: deciding what to express
(conceptualization), determining how to express it (formulation), expressing it
(articulation) and correcting errors (self-monitoring).
1) Conceptualization: Language production starts with a clear conception of what to
communicate. A speaker decides upon an intention or some content to express (e.g., a
desired outcome or an observation) and encodes the situational constraints on how the
content may be expressed (e.g., polite or informal speech, monolingual or mixing
languages; see Levelt, 1989). This process is termed conceptualization or message
planning. It is the conception of an intention. What the speaker intends to express is to
be given a linguistic shape, it has to be formulated.
2) Formulation: Once the idea we want to transmit is produced, it should be
formulated into a meaningful message. The next major stage, then, is
formulation,which involves word selection. (Fromkin, 1971; Garrett, 1975). Deciding
which word to use involves selecting a word in one’s vocabulary. Besides, the language
user selects the syntactic structure in which his sentence/utterance will appear.
3) Articulation: this is the concrete stage of language production. It involves the
execution of motor programs to pronounce the sounds of a word. It is the
transformation of the formulated message into audible and comprehensible
articulations. The words’ segments are spelled out one after another.
4) Self-Monitoring: We all make errors when we speak. When I intend to say for example ‘Put the bread on
the table’, I may say ‘Put the table on the table’ instead. We can listen to our speech and detect errors, just as
we can listen to the speech of others and detect their errors. But not all the self-produced errors are detected by
the speaker. Self-monitoring requires attention. The speaker corrects many of the errors made in the actual
production of speech. He can stop in the middle of a sentence, a word or a syllable. He can even use such
expressions as ‘no’, ‘sorry’, ‘, ‘I mean’, ‘that is’.
II) Language Comprehension
Language comprehension involves the perception and interpretation of information. The listener/ the receiver
of information decodes information. Decoding in listening is referred to as auditory perception whereas
decoding in reading is referred to as visual perception.
The individual is capable of recognizing the phonemes which constitute a spoken/written word. When we
receive information, a small word initial segment activates all the words in the mental lexicon that match it
phonologically. For example, when you receive the word ‘train’, all words beginning with /tr/ will be
activated. As more phonetic information becomes available (other phonemes are pronounced), many more
words are eliminated. This process continues until a single word remains.
The Mental Lexicon
In order to produce and understand language, spoken or written, an individual must have available some form of
cognitive representation of the words of their language. This pool of mentally stored information is called the
mental lexicon or the human word store.
The human word store is often referred to as the 'mental dictionary' or, perhaps more commonly, as the mental
lexicon.
The mental lexicon has become a common aspect and has attracted a large number of researchers to
investigate. It is known as a mental dictionary which contains information about a word’s pronunciation,
meaning, syntactic attributes, and so on, (Jackendoff, R.S, 2002).