Steps Toward a Psycholinguistic Model of Language Production

Unknown author (1979-04)

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under Office of Naval Research contract N00014-75-C-0643.

Working Paper

This paper discusses what it would mean to have a psychological model of the language production process: what such a model would have to account for, what it would use as evidence. It outlines and motivates one particular model including: presumptions about the input to the process, a characterization of language production as a process of selection under constraint, and the principle stipulations of the model. This paper is an introduction, which is largely nontechnical and uses only simple examples. A detailed presentation of the architecture of the model, its grammar, and its interface to the speaker will be forthcoming in other papers.