Cognition and language processing

• Drawing on background knowledge to assist in comprehending the message.

• assigning an interaction to a particular event (story telling, joking, praying, complaining)

• assigning places, persons or things to categories (Luigi’s = Italian restaurant)

• Inferring: the sequence between events

• Inferring: missing details

• work on the incoming message itself, decoding sounds, words, clauses and sentences.

• scanning the input to identify familiar lexical items • Word recognition: poll, pall, pill, pull

• segmenting the stream of speech into constituents ('abookofmine' = 4 words)

• using grammatical cues to organize the input into constituents

• Limited capacity to process information (max. 8 items)

– rapid computation of rules? (cf. Controlled processing)

• Fluent speech

– Encoding of propositional plan (the message) by recourse to ready-made chunks of language (cf. Item-based knowledge)

– Ready made chunks of language require minimal processing capacity > rapid retrieval (Skehan 1998; Logan 1988)

• Rising processing effort > processing overload

– speech marked by pauses and hesitation markers (e.g. hm) that show that online planning is taking place („… something from my grandmother…“)

• novel messages

– Unavailability of ready-made chunks of stored language

– neccessary connections have not yet been firmly established („*You can take all your dreams“)

– speakers fall back on their rule-based system and construct utterances with the help of generative rules in order to achieve precision and expressive force

• No definite answer (Wolff 2002)

• „the word store in the human mind“ (Aitchison 1992)?

• Words are like triggers that give access to meanings