Salience and Sentencing: Some Production Principles

The major goals of psycholinguistics are to specify the antecedents of utterances in language production and the consequents of utterances in language comprehension. However, apart from studies of language acquisition, there seems to have been little concern with “where do sentences come from ?”, as one of the authors put it ( Osgood, 1971 )–the production problem. Rather, the focus of research interest has been on “where do sentences go to?”–the comprehension problem. In his Annual Review of Psychology chapter on experimental psycholinguistics, Johnson-Laird (1974) opens with the assertion that “the fundamental problem in psycholinguistics is simple to formulate: what happens when we understand sentences? [p. 35].” This emphasis in a review chapter on comprehension, to the exclusion of production, can be justified only on the ground that most of the research available in the literature is on language comprehension. As Fodor, Bever, and Garrett ( 1974 ) observe, “practically anything that one can say about speech production must be considered speculative even by the standards current in psycholinguistics [p. 434].”