Thinking for speaking and thinking for listening: The interaction of thought and language in typical and non-fluent comprehension and production

Abstract

In this paper, we reconsider some of the processes that distinguish production and comprehension. In particular, we discuss the specific forms of thinking involved in each: “thinking for speaking” and “thinking for listening” (Black & Chiat, 2000; Slobin, 1996). We argue that thinking for speaking (or for any form of language output) crucially involves schematisation or “paring down” of conceptual information (Dipper, 1999), a process partly driven by the language system itself. Thinking for listening, on the other hand, involves an “enrichment” of skeletal conceptual information derived from the linguistic input, using pragmatic principles. Production and comprehension involve distinct forms of interaction between thought and language, and should not be characterised as a simple reversal of the same processes. This approach allows us to account for different patterns of production and comprehension in non-fluent aphasia, and predict some of the factors the facilitate processing for people with these language impairments.

Notes

¹Although this is an example of a relatively straightforward relation between form and meaning, even here there are 3 distinct meanings—the information, the object, the institution. In combination with different verbs the noun newspaper will be interpreted differently, e.g., She read the newspaper She dropped the newspaper She worked for the newspaper