Are comprehension and production a single, integrated skill, or are they separate processes drawing on a shared abstract knowledge of language? We argue that a fundamental constraint on memory, the Now-or-Never bottleneck, implies that language processing is incremental and that language learning occurs on-line. These properties are difficult to reconcile with the ‘abstract knowledge’ viewpoint...

While implementing a d iagnost ic expert system, FAITH, we have developed a new language, FCL, for c o n t r o l l i n g the f i r i n g of product ions. FCL grea t ly s i m p l i f i e s the task of the user to d i r ec t t h i s f i r i n g in a coherent and purposeful way without s a c r i f i c i n g some of the main advantages enjoyed by product ion systems. One of the i n t e r e s t i n ...

This paper describes an experiment on the production of handshape change in Taiwan Sign Language using the implicit priming experimental paradigm (Meyer 1990, 1991). The results not only provide new evidence that phonological form plays an important role in sign production, but also that the time course of sign production closely matches that predicted by a prominent model of spoken word produc...

The authors examined the relationship between language production (LP) processes and thought disorder. Thirty-nine schizophrenic or schizoaffective participants completed tasks measuring discourse planning, monitoring, and grammatical-phonological encoding, as well as an interview used to rate thought disorder. The authors found that different LP processes were differentially related to differe...

What's up with the printer? Context relative presentation of conceptual structure and its prosodic realization in a language production system.. The papers presented in this issue show some results of current work being performed in the SYNPHONICS * project group. They continue what gradually becomes a tradition: to regularly report in a compact form about the actual research that centers aroun...

Recent work proposes that language production is organized to facilitate efficient communication by means of transmitting information at a constant rate. However, evidence has almost exclusively come from English. We present new results from Mandarin Chinese supporting the hypothesis that Constant Entropy Rate is observed cross-linguistically, and may be a universal property of the language pro...

A classic debate in the psychology of language concerns the question of the grain-size of the linguistic information that is stored in memory. One view is that only morphologically simple forms are stored (e.g., 'car', 'red'), and that more complex forms of language such as multi-word phrases (e.g., 'red car') are generated on-line from the simple forms. In two experiments we tested this view. ...

Since Cohen introduced the term ‘‘gerolinguistics’’ in 1979, there has been accelerating interest in understanding the nature of language in old age. Searching PsychINFO using the key words ‘‘language and aging’’ generated 9 citations for the decade from 1970 to 1979, 80 for 1980 to 1989, 270 for 1990 to 1999, and 171 for the 5-year period from 2000 to 2004. This surge in interest in language a...

The theme of this Special Issue is asymmetries in language acquisition, and the contributions present evidence for either the presence or the absence of a production/comprehension asymmetry in child language. The authors focus on various areas of linguistics, ranging from phonology and syntax to semantics and pragmatics, using a variety of empirical methods. Although the contributions do not ag...