PROCESSING
The analysis, classification and interpretation of a stimulus. In psycholinguistics, particularly used for the cognitive operations underlying (a) the four language skills (speaking, listening, reading, writing); (b) the retrieval of lexical items; and (c) the construction of meaning representations. The term sometimes refers more narrowly to the receptive process of listening and reading.
Current models of processing owe much to early information processing theory, which represented cognitive behaviour in terms of mental states and of processes that modify the states in clearly defined stages. One development was a view of language processing as involving the transmission of linguistic data through a series of levels of representation (feature, phoneme/letter, word, syntactic unit), at each of which it was reshaped.
Early models of processing tended, like early computers, to be serial: a particular operation (e.g. forming sounds into a word) had to be complete before the next began. However, most current models assume that processing is parallel, with different levels of representation active simultaneously.
See also: Bottom-up processing, Interactive activation, Level of rep resentation, Modularity2, Parallel processing, Top-down processing
Further reading: Jackendoff (1987: Chap. 6)
