The Parallel Architecture in Language and Elsewhere

Abstract

The Parallel Architecture is a conception of the organization of the mental representations involved in language and of the role of language in the mind as a whole. Its basic premise is that linguistic representations draw on three independent generative systems—phonological, syntactic, and semantic structures—plus a system of interface links by which they communicate with each other. In particular, words serve as partial interface links that govern the way they compose into novel sentences. It is shown that this architecture also provides a natural way to account for our ability to talk about what we see: semantic structure in language has to communicate via interface links with a level of spatial representation that encodes understanding of the physical world. It is suggested that such configurations of independent but linked representations are a widespread feature of cognition.