Page 67 - The Modul of Psycholinguistics Studies_2

not take account of underlying cognitive processes. For this, a
psycholinguistic approach is needed.

The psycholinguistic approach attempts to make good
some of the shortcomings of the other approaches by viewing

children's speech problems as being derived from a breakdown in
an underlying speech processing system. A number of models
have been developed from this basic structure (e.g., Dodd, 1995;

Stackhouse and Wells, 1997; Hewlett, Gibbon, and Cohen-
McKenzie, 1998; Chiat, 2000). They assumes that the child
receives information of different kinds (auditory, visual) about an

utterance, remembers it, and stores it in a variety of lexical
representations (a means for keeping information about words,

which may be semantic, grammatical, phonological, motor, or
orthographic) within the lexicon (a store of words), then selects
and produces spoken and written words. Figure 1 illustrates the

basic essentials of a psycholinguistic model of speech processing.
On the left there is a channel for the input of information via the

ear and on the right a channel for the output of information
through the mouth. The lexical representations at the top of the
model store previously processed information. In psycholinguistic

terms, top-down processing refers to an activity whereby
previously stored information (i.e., in the lexical

representations) is helpful and used, for example, in naming
objects in pictures. A bottom-up processing activity requires no
such prior knowledge and can be completed without accessing

stored linguistic knowledge from the lexical representations; an
example is repeating sounds.

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