Aspects of Language Production

The focus of this volume is experimental psycholinguistic research into language production processes. Traditionally in the field of psycholinguistics, the study of language production has played the poor relation to research on language comprehension and language acquisition processes. However, today language production boasts a dedicated, imaginative, and highly productive group of researchers, which continues to grow steadily. The first aim of this volume is, therefore, to present readers with a picture of the breadth of current research in the field. To this end, there are chapters investigating all levels of the language production system from generation of the phonological and phonetic representations of speech to the co-ordination of spontaneous conversation. A second aim of this volume is to draw links between different approaches to language research and to argue the need for the development of models informed by the wide range of language production data that already exists in the literature. Inparticular contributors have focused on models of visual word processing, aphasic speech, object recognition and language production in children. Finally many chapters highlight the need for psychological models of language production to learn from theoretical linguistics in order to become better informed about the structure of language itself. Therefore, this volume also includes chapters written by linguists for psychologists who serve to remind us of the complexity of structure and process in the languages of the world. The result is a diverse set of chapters that are representative of the major research issues in language production today.