Summary
The incorporation of editors and monitors in models of language production has become a common practice over the past ten years or so. However, there is much confusion in the psycholinguistics literature about these two control mechanisms. A monitor is redefined as a television viewer who can spot problems on the screen but cannot do anything about it. An editor, in contrast, is powerful enough to change the programme so as to produce fewer and less anomalous errors. Although there is no doubt that our speech is internally monitored, it is far from clear that this is achieved via editing. Not only can editing models be shown to suffer from serious defects, but also the data which motivated the introduction of editors in the first place lend themselves more plausibly to a reanalysis in terms of evidencing properties of the regular programming process. It is argued that McClelland and Rumelhart's interactive activation model accommodates the monitoring function quite nicely without any additional theoretical apparatus. Monitoring is carried out by a mechanism called non-local feedback which results automatically from bottom-up information flow in a parallel processing system. All the speaker has to do is to check the activation levels of the nodes in his internal network. He discovers problems whenever the levels of activation are too low with respect to the idea he wishes to communicate.
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Earlier versions of this paper were written while I was training for teacher unemployment at the “Staatliches Studienseminar” in Speyer, Germany. It is dedicated to all my supervisors who, unknowingly and, I dare say, in spite of themselves gave me just enough time to write it up
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Berg, T. The problems of language control: Editing, monitoring, and feedback. Psychol. Res 48, 133–144 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00309161
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00309161