Steps Toward a Psycholinguistic Model of Language Production

Abstract

This paper discusses what it would mean to have a psychological model of the language production process: what such a model would have to account for, what it would use as evidence. It outlines and motivates one particular model including: presumptions about the input to the process, a characterization of language production as a process of selection under constraint, and the principle stipulations of the model. This paper is an introduction, which is largely nontechnical and uses only simple examples. A detailed presentation of the architecture of the model, its grammar, and its interface to the speaker will be forthcoming in other papers.