Language Comprehension and ProductionPreparation of this chapter was supported by NIH Grant HD051610 to R.T. and NIH Grant HD18708 to C.C. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NICHD or NIH.

Abstract

To produce and comprehend words and sentences, people use their knowledge of language structure, their knowledge of the situation they are in, including the previous discourse and the local situation, and their cognitive abilities, including memory, attention, and motor control. In this chapter, we explore how competent adult language users bring such knowledge and abilities to bear on the tasks of comprehending spoken and written language and producing spoken language. We emphasize experimental data collected using the tools of cognitive psychology, touching only briefly on language development, disordered language, and the neural basis of language. We also review some of the major theoretical controversies that have occupied the field of psycholinguistics, including the role that linguistic analyses of language structure should play and the debate between modular and interactive views. We also present some of the theoretical positions that have proven successful in guiding our understanding of language processing. We conclude by discussing the need to integrate studies of language comprehension and language production and pointing to emerging research topics.