A parallel interface for language and cognition in sentence production: Theory, method, and experimental evidence

Abstract

The debate about the place of linguistic theory in cognitive science encouraged by The Linguistic Review is a good example of communication between different research communities. In this follow-up paper we (1) clarify our theoretical and methodological positions, (2) propose a theoretical model for language production similar to Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture, and (2) Theory and method in language researchIn his seminal book, Foundations of Language (FL, 2002), Jackendoff proposed a very powerful and ambitious model of language organization. Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture has a great theoretical promise as it suggests a solid and empirically informed account of the language faculty that goes beyond the focus on competence common among generativists. As such, it incorporates and is consistent with, a great deal of experimental evidence about neural and psychological reality behind language accumulated in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics. It also makes specific predictions about the chronometrical and functional properties of language-cognition We agree with Jackendoff that many contributors to the Special Issue of The Linguistic Review (TLR), including ourselves, chose an easy way to justify their critique of the syntactic bias of generative linguistics. It is true that most critics largely overlooked the motivation of Jackendoff's parallel architecture as a theory that addresses the variety of phonological, semantic, and pragmatic parameters of language as well as its relation to other cognitive domains in favor of criticizing classical Chomskian generativism. An attentive reader should not only notice that Jackendoff's proposal retains very little of classical Chomskian separation between competence and performance, but also that Jackendoff's model possesses important properties that help to reduce the level of encapsulation within the levels of language organization as well as to relate linguistic processes to less specialized cognitive domains. As such, Parallel Architecture has a much greater explanatory power and functional efficiency.The publication of FL encouraged a discussion of the place of linguistic theory in our understanding of cognitive mechanisms of language organization, its evolution, and development in human mind. It may be useful to invert this question and ask what role psychological and neuroscientific explorations can play in developing a better theoretical account of language? Answering these questions will require both linguists who are ready to study psychology and statistical methods and psychologists who are not shy to take a course in theoretical linguistics. The special issue (TLR) was an important attempt to bring together researchers from fields usually separated by theoretical and methodological barriers. Hopefully, these barriers are not impenetrable. The discussion continues, and Jackendoff's reply to this special issue of TLR can indeed "play the role of a simulated conversation among its authors", both virtual and actual (Jackendo...

The Cross‐linguistic Study of Sentence Production

“…Ferreira 1994; Prat‐Sala and Branigan 2000; van Nice and Dietrich 2003; Kempen and Harbusch 2004; Rosenbach 2005; Bresnan et al 2007; Dennison 2008) and contextually conditioned properties (accessibility increases with previous mention of the same referent, MacWhinney and Bates 1978; Bock and Irwin 1980; V. S. Ferreira and Yoshita 2003; Prat‐Sala and Branigan 2000; Bresnan et al. 2007; semantic similarity to recently mentioned words, Bock 1986b; Igoa 1996; visual salience , Gleitman et al 2007; Myachykov 2007; Myachykov, Garrod, and Scheepers, forthcoming; Myachykov, Posner, and Tomlin 2007). Production researchers have been interested in conceptual accessibility, because it affects speakers’ word order choices, for example, in active vs. passive voice ( Lightning struck the church vs.…”

Attention and syntax in sentence production: A critical review

“…First, we provide a very brief outline of what attention is. Second, we discuss the nature and the corresponding evidence of the two theoretical accounts that relate attention to syntactic choice: the grammatical role account (e.g., Tomlin, 1995) and the positional account (e.g., Myachykov, 2007;Myachykov, Posner, & Tomlin, 2007). In brief, the former account suggests that the focused referent is mapped as the most prominent grammatical constituent in a sentence (e.g., Subject); the latter maintains that the attentionally focused referent tends to occupy the sentential starting point regardless of its grammatical status.…”

Visual salience effects on speaker choices: Direct or indirect influences on linguistic processing?

“…Although most researchers will probably agree with the previous statement, some explanations of perceptual influences on language production seem to either disregard the existence of an intermediate level of event conceptualization or confound it with sentence preparation under the implicit assumption that what you see is what you say (Ibbotson, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2013; Montag & MacDonald, 2013; Myachykov et al, 2012; Myachykov, Thompson, et al, 2011), rather than determining what you may want to say. More specifically, looks to elements in a scene are linked directly with the building blocks of sentence production rather than with the way the scene is apprehended (see, e.g., Myachykov, Posner, & Tomlin, 2007, p. 464, their figure 2; Myachykov, Thompson, Garrod, et al, 2011). In consequence, the fact that speakers’ gazes are drawn to a specific object and this object is then chosen as the syntactic subject of the final description is taken to mean that the starting point in sentence production is a lexical item rather than a syntactic frame (Gleitman et al, 2007; for a detailed description of the “syntactic planning starting point” debate, see Bock, Irwin, & Davidson, 2004).…”