The Analysis of Sentence Production

This chapter presents an analysis of sentence production, by distinguishing between the general problem of language production, which must include message formulation, and the specific problem of sentence production, which may be viewed as translation process. The chapter assumes that somewhere in the recesses of the central nervous system, an interaction takes place among the current motor and perceptual experiences, stored information, motivational systems, and various other variables. This interaction gives rise to a communicative intention, also termed as message. This message has to be translated into a set of instructions sufficient to guide the articulatory apparatus. The final point that should be made from the analysis of sentence production is that even if one to has good evidence about the vocabulary of the computational system that mediates the translation from messages into their realization as instructions to the articulatory system, one would still be unsatisfied. The reason of this dissatisfaction is that one would want to be able to characterize the information flow in the system in terms of interactions between the various structural types represented in the computational vocabulary.