Functional Architecture of the Language-Processing System
Max Coltheart, Giuseppe Sartori, Remo Job · Psychology Press eBooks · 2013
The contributors to this book share a core set of assumptions about human linguistic behaviour and how it may be studied. The first of these assump tions is that language performance-the perception and the production of written and spoken language-is mediated by an internal informationprocessing system, the language-processing system, which acts to form and to transform various types of linguistic representations. The second assumption is that this language-processing system is modular in character. The term “modular” is meant to indicate that the system is made up of relatively independent sub-systems-that is, individual information processing compo nents-each responsible for a particular circumscribed linguistic processing task, such as identifying letters, producing spoken words, or accessing semantic representations. The third assumption is that there are two different but equally valid and equally valuable methods for investigating the nature of a modularly organised language-processing system. One way is to carry out laboratory investigations of some language-processing task with normal subjects. Alternatively, one can study people in whom brain damage has impaired the ability to perform certain language-processing tasks. This is “the cognitive neuropsychology of language,” a sphere of investigation in which theories about the language-processing system are used to interpret data from patients with linguistic impairments, and data from such patients are used to test and to refine such theories. All of the work reported in this book adopts this approach to the study of language.