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Language research has provided insight into how speakers translate a thought into a sequence of sounds that ultimately becomes words, phrases, and sentences. Despite the complex stages involved in this process, relatively little is known about how we avoid and handle production and comprehension errors that would otherwise impede communication. We review current research on the mechanisms underlying monitoring and control of the language system, especially production, with particular emphasis on whether such monitoring is issued by domain-general or domain-specific procedures.
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How Special Is Language Production? Perspectives From Monitoring and Control
In his seminal essay, “The Modularity of Mind” Fodor (1983), presents arguments in favor of language comprehension as a special module along with other input processing systems. His view on language production is less clear. In this chapter, I first demonstrate that language production and comprehension are quite similar when evaluated in light of Fodor's criteria for modules: both meet a subset of those criteria in that their behavior resembles automatic processing; neither, however, is informationally encapsulated. This partial conformity with the criteria for specialized modules, leaves the question “How special is language production?” unanswered. I will then propose that this question can be answered by re-examining the origin of what resembles the behavior of an automatic system. I will argue that language production is, in fact, an efficiently monitored and controlled system, and that such monitoring and control mechanisms are shared between language production and other systems. These domain-general mechanisms, however, operate on domain-specific representations, creating specialized monitoring-control loops that can be selectively trained and selectively damaged.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1631993
- PAR ID:
- 10292554
- Editor(s):
- Federmeier, K. D.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The psychology of learning and motivation
- Volume:
- 68
- ISSN:
- 1557-802X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 179-213
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.plm.2018.08.006
