About This Course

Language comprehension and language production are often studied separately. The language production system is charged with the task of translating thoughts and desires into a motor plan for action, moving through word selection, syntactic planning and phonological planning stages along the way. The compre- hension system has a different task: to take as input an auditory or visual signal, identify the words in that signal and assign the input a structure and a meaning. However, there are good reasons to think of production and comprehension as parts of one language system. In this course we will look at the ways in which production and comprehension interact. We will tackle questions like: Does the syntactic structure of something you just heard influence the way you’ll say your next sentence? Do people tailor their to ut- terances to the comprehension systems of their audience? When reading, is there a little voice in your head producing the sentence? We will explore these and other questions and use them to evaluate the hypothesis that production and comprehension form an integrated system.