On language production principles and the form of language: a más cómo, menos por qué

Abstract

Comments on an article by M. C MacDonald (see record [rid]2013-20854-001[/rid]). MacDonald presents with a thorough discussion of some principles operating on language production, and suggests a significant impact of those principles on the form of language and grammar. The discussion is adequately framed within the general theme of the relative weight that organism internal factors and experience have in cognition. The paper opens with some reference to findings on motion perception and object-face recognition, and it summarizes the state of the art acknowledging that 'While such accounts don’t deny innate factors in perception, they are notable in ascribing a central role for experience in development and in adult performance. MacDonald 'not that all aspects of language form and comprehension can be traced to the computational demands of language production, but rather that production’s impact in these areas is so pervasive that understanding production becomes essential to explaining why language is the way it is, and why language comprehension works the way it does.' MacDonald that the separation of psycholinguists who study production and perception mechanisms of language and linguists who study language form is a real and quite unfortunate one, but we both probably agree that this gulf has been bridged progressively in the last years, at least in some realms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)