Exploring Levels of Processing in Sentence Production

Typically, the production of speech involves the conversion of ideas into sounds. The ideas seem to precede the sounds. These truisms form the rudiments of two less self-evident claims to be examined in this chapter. The first is that different types of linguistic information, or different representational vocabularies, are called on at different points in the creation of a sentence's syntactic structure. This is the levels-of-processing hypothesis. The second claim is that these levels of processing are hierarchically organized, with no interaction between lower and higher levels. This is the non-interaction hypothesis. To anticipate the arguments to be presented, there is both observational and experimental support for the levels-of-processing hypothesis, but little in favor of the non-interaction hypothesis. A fragment of a production theory will be outlined that accounts for these patterns of evidence with the assumptions that there is feedback from phonological to semantic representations within the lexicon (Dell & Reich, 1981) and that this feedback can influence the assignment of semantic representations to syntactic functions (Bock & Warren, 1985). Because different levels of syntactic processing call on the lexicon, although for different types of information, this feedback mediates the interaction between levels.