A PRELIMINARY PHASE OF LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION: OUTLINE OF A SYSTEM'S MODEL Available to Purchase

It is the purpose of this paper to indicate certain difficulties confronting traditional approaches to language comprehension. Examples of these difficulties will be presented based on linguistic, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic observations. We shall submit that efforts to provide a satisfactory account of these observations must entail a reconceptualization of language comprehension within a systems framework. A computer simulation of these observations indicates the feasibility of a simple model specifying a preliminary phase of language comprehension. This phase is defined as involving an interactive interface between the morphological properties of linguistic stimuli and the individual's “knowledge of the world”.