Comprehension vs. production

J. Cooper Cutting
Table of contents

Language allows us to express and communicate our thoughts to others. Using language to communicate these thoughts relies on our abilities to both produce and to comprehend language. That is, without someone who can comprehend language (the ‘listener’), someone producing an utterance (the ‘speaker’) won’t be able to communicate thoughts via that utterance. Luckily, each one of us is both a speaker and a listener. Both the dependency between production and comprehension for communication and the fact that we all have both abilities, leads to a central question in language research: how are the two processes related? In other words, is going from thought to language and from language to thought, accomplished by a single system working in two directions, or by two separate systems? Most of the research on this question comes from the domain of psycholinguistics, primarily because of the focus on intermediate mental representations and processes.

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