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 Black, M. and Chiat, S. 2000. “Putting thoughts into verbs: Developmental and acquired impairments”. In Semantic processing: Theory and practice, Edited by: Best, W., Bryan, K. and Maxim, J. 52–79. London: Whurr Publishers. [Google Scholar]; Slobin, 1996 Slobin, D. I. 1996. “From ‘thought and language’ to thinking for speaking”. In Rethinking linguistic relativity, Edited by: Gumperz, J. J. and Levinson, S. C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]). We argue that thinking for speaking (or for any form of language output) crucially involves schematisation or “paring down” of conceptual information (Dipper, 1999 Dipper , L. T. ( 1999 ). Event processing in non-fluent aphasia: The interaction between verbs, sentences and events; with data from 6 people with non-fluent aphasia . Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, UCL . [Google Scholar]), 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.