Introduction

Psychological adaptations are problem-solving neurocognitive mechanisms that

survived the process of natural selection because of their value in solving adaptive
problems. The main feature of an evolved psychological mechanism is its functionality,
that is, how it contributes to the survival or reproductive success of the individual in
whose brain the mechanism resides (Cosmides and Tooby 1994). More inclusively, an
evolved psychological mechanism’s function can be viewed in terms of its contribution
to the survival or reproductive success of individuals who share genes with the
individual in whose brain the mechanism resides (Dawkins 2016).

Resources

1. Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1994). Origins of domain specificity: The

evolution of functional organization. In L. Hirschfeld & S. Gelman
(Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (pp.
85–116). New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Dawkins, R. (2016). The selfish gene (4th ed.). New York: Oxford university
press.Google Scholar

In this chapter, we will discuss the psychological mechanisms that are

involved in using language. Together with the linguistic principles
presented in Chapter 2, these mechanisms provide the basis for an
integrated understanding of language use. Language processing is a joint
product of linguistic principles and psychological mechanisms.

This chapter consists of three sections. The first presents an overview of the
human information-processing system. This provides a framework for
understanding human cognition, whether it operates within the linguistic
sphere or not. The second section applies these concepts more directly to
language pro-cessing and examines a series of issues that arise in this
context. The final section sketches the development of the processing
system and examines the question of which portions of the system may be
present at the time that most children acquire their native language.
 Serial and Parallel Processing

If a group of processes takes place one at a time, it is called serial processing. If two
or more of the processes take place simultaneously, it is called parallel pro-cessing.
Serial models have been influential in the study of language and cogni-tion over the
past quarter century, in part because many of the models were based on the electronic
computer, which tends to execute processes rapidly in a serial manner.

Suppose we wish to develop a model of language production. We could take

as our starting point the idea that the speaker wishes to convey. The ending point
would be the actual articulation of the idea. But what happens in between? A
serial model would divide the process into stages: A stage might be devoted to
developing the phrase structure of the sentence, another to retrieving the lexical
items that are inserted into the structure, and still another to determining the
correct pronunciation of these lexical items. The serial model would assume that
these stages occur one at a time, with none overlapping (Fromkin, 1971). If, on
the other hand, we assume a parallel model, all of these processes could take
place at the same time (Dell, 1986). That is, we could be phonetically speci-fying
one word while we search for the next word, or both of these processes could
take place as we flesh out the syntactic structure.

Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processes

Suppose you are listening to a lecturer, trying to comprehend what is being said and
to remember the main points of the lecture. We can view your language processing as
occurring on a set of levels. At the lowest, the phonological level, you are identifying
the phonemes and syllables that the lecturer is using. At a higher level, the lexical
level, you are using the identification of phonemes and syllables to retrieve the
lexical entries of the words from your semantic memory. At the next level, the
syntactic level, you are organizing the words into consti-tuents and forming a phrase
structure for the sentence. Finally, at the highest level, the discourse level, you are
linking the meaning of a given sentence with preceding ones and organizing
sentences into higher-order units.

Automatic and Controlled Processes

Although the concept of automaticity has been discussed throughout the his-
tory of psychology (James, 1890/1950; Jastrow, 1906), psychologists have only
recently pursued the concept intensively. Automaticity has been defined in a
number of ways. In general, automatic tasks tend to be unintentional, uncontrol-
lable, unconscious, efficient, and fast. Although these criteria are closely related
to one another, it is possible to tease them apart (Moors & de Houwer, 2006).
 Certain automatic tasks appear to be biologically built into our cognitive
equipment. We have, for example, an automatic process in which we are able to
roughly estimate the frequency of an event (Hasher & Zacks, 1979). Most of us can
correctly judge that red automobiles are more common than yellow ones. This
‘‘frequency counter’’ does not require conscious effort; it is simply a by-product of
processing a stimulus in some way. Other tasks become automatic as a consequence
of our degree of practice with them. Many of the tasks we per-form automatically,
such as tying our shoelaces, have been done thousands of times. They were more
demanding when we were young and have become auto-matic through practice.