Issues of Representation in Psycholinguistics

This chapter discusses the need for explicit, well-motivated linguistic representations in psycholinguistics, highlighting the possibility that much of the predictive and explanatory work of psycholinguistic theories may derive from the properties of these representations and from the vocabulary and constraints needed to generate or describe them. Natural classes of representations offer the rationale for the particular way the language processor is modularized, determining the overall architecture of the system and the relation between subsystems. On this approach, it is essentially the representations that define the tasks of language comprehension and regulate the interplay between subsystems. The chapter discusses several open issues that confront the representational approach to language processing and examines the area of syntax and semantics. Under this, it illustrates the dependence of processing hypotheses on the linguistic representations assigned to particular sentences. It also takes a look at the issues of precompilation, describing the mental representation of the grammar, that is, at the format in which humans store the grammatical knowledge that permits a well-formed representation to be assigned to a (novel) word, phrase, or sentence. Finally, the chapter states tha topen questions remain concerning what aspects of structure or meaning must obligatorily be specified within each subsystem or representation type of linguistics.