One of the problems of this assumption is that many second language
speakers regularly experience a“feeling of knowing”. They want to say
something in the foreign language, but are aware of the fact that they do not
know or have quick access to a word they are going to need tofinish a sentence
(de Bot 2004). This suggests at least some form of feedforward in speaking.
Additional evidence against a strict incremental view is provided in an
interesting experiment by Haldet al. (2006). In this experiment, speaker
characteristics (social dialect) and speech characteristics (high/low cultural
content) were distributed in such a way that speaker and speech character-
istics were orthogonally varied. Listeners heard speakers whose dialect
clearly showed their high or low socio-economic status talk about Chopin’s
piano music or about tattoos. The combinations of high cultural content and
low social status in a neuro-imaging experiment led to N400 reactions, which
showed that these utterances were experienced as deviant. A comparison
with similar sentences with grammatical deviations showed that the semantic
errors were detected earlier than the syntactic ones, which is a problem for a
purely incremental process from semantics to syntax and phonology. The
semantics and pragmatics seem to override the syntax in this experiment.
Isolated elements (phonemes, words, sentences) are studied without
taking into account the larger linguistics and social context they are part of.
If cognition is situated, embodied and distributed, studying isolated el-
ements is fairly pointless: we need to investigate them as they relate to other
aspects of the larger context, both linguistic and extra-linguistic. For exam-
ple, work by Eisner and McQueen (2006) has shown that the perception of
ambiguous phonemes is strongly influenced by the semantics of the context
in which that phoneme is used.
For language production: based on individual monologue rather than
interaction as the default speaking situation.
As Pickering and Garrod (2004) have argued, we should move away from
monologue as the default type of language production and look at interac-
tion instead. The task for a speaker is fundamentally different in interaction
as compared to monologue. The literature on syntactic priming supports
this way of looking at production: how language is used depends only partly
on the intentions and activities of individual speakers and is to a large extent
defined by the characteristics of the interaction.
Language processing involves operations on invariant and abstract
representations.
In the models presented earlier, and in the information processing approach
in general the assumption is that language processing is the manipulation of
92 Trends III