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9
LANGUAGE PROCESSES
In the previous chapter, I reviewed structural characteristics of linguistic
utterances and language behavior. In this chapter, I address the cognitive
processes that produce this structure. I begin with speech perception, exam-
ining the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the processing of phones and
phonemes. I then address lexical access and the processing of sentences,
examining the cognitive mechanisms that underlie morphology, syntax, and
semantics. In the section on immediacy of interpretation, I review the impor-
tant role that top-down processing plays in language. Two final sections
address sentence memory and discourse processing, focusing on the mecha-
nisms that extract propositions from text and integrate them into referent
models. Although most of this chapter focuses on language comprehension,
a final section reviews language production.
9.1 SPEECH PERCEPTION
People's ability to recognize phoneme sequences is impressive. Consider
four properties of the normal speech signal:
Rapid rate. Given that normal speech contains an average of 15 phonemes
per second, people categorize about 1 phoneme every 67 msec. If pushed,
they can even categorize normal speech that has been speeded up to a rate
of 50 phonemes per second, or about 1 phoneme every 20 msec ( Foulke &

-213-

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Publication Information: Book Title: Cognitive Psychology: An Overview for Cognitive Scientists. Contributors: Lawrence W. Barsalou - author. Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Place of Publication: Hillsdale, NJ. Publication Year: 1992. Page Number: 213.
    
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