The MIT Press. While the grammar of the language provides us with an adequate description of the structure of a language, a language processing system must do more. In addition to accounting for the structure of the language produced, a model of language processing must also account for the functional aspects of language to explain how we are able to acquire, produce, and comprehend language. In the following two summaries we are going look at the latter and examine the processes involved in the comprehension of spoken and written sentences. Since the last are not thought to be processes operating within the domain of the language processing system, we shall restrict our discussion to word and sentence level processes.
Word recognition consists of three component processes.
Finally, there is the recognition component, in which the outputs of lexical access are made available to both sentence level processes and conscious awareness. A critical distinction between the two model types is that the former assumes interactive processing - that activation from previous inputs can be fed back into the lexical processing system to aid the recognition of subsequent related inputs. Search models, on the other hand, assume autonomous or modular processing , where lexical access is achieved over the input form only with no mechanism for prior information to influence the processing of a subsequent word. These processes are collectively known as parsing processes .