Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, WI, USA.
Front Psychol. 2013 Apr 26;4:226. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00226. eCollection 2013.
Language production processes can provide insight into how language comprehension works and language typology-why languages tend to have certain characteristics more often than others. Drawing on work in memory retrieval, motor planning, and serial order in action planning, the Production-Distribution-Comprehension (PDC) account links work in the fields of language production, typology, and comprehension: (1) faced with substantial computational burdens of planning and producing utterances, language producers implicitly follow three biases in utterance planning that promote word order choices that reduce these burdens, thereby improving production fluency. (2) These choices, repeated over many utterances and individuals, shape the distributions of utterance forms in language. The claim that language form stems in large degree from producers' attempts to mitigate utterance planning difficulty is contrasted with alternative accounts in which form is driven by language use more broadly, language acquisition processes, or producers' attempts to create language forms that are easily understood by comprehenders. (3) Language perceivers implicitly learn the statistical regularities in their linguistic input, and they use this prior experience to guide comprehension of subsequent language. In particular, they learn to predict the sequential structure of linguistic signals, based on the statistics of previously-encountered input. Thus, key aspects of comprehension behavior are tied to lexico-syntactic statistics in the language, which in turn derive from utterance planning biases promoting production of comparatively easy utterance forms over more difficult ones. This approach contrasts with classic theories in which comprehension behaviors are attributed to innate design features of the language comprehension system and associated working memory. The PDC instead links basic features of comprehension to a different source: production processes that shape language form.
语言产生过程可以深入了解语言理解的工作原理和语言类型学——为什么语言往往具有某些特征而不是其他特征。基于记忆检索、运动规划和动作规划中的序列顺序的工作，生产-分配-理解（PDC）理论将语言产生、类型学和理解领域的工作联系起来：（1）面对规划和产生话语的巨大计算负担，语言产生者在话语规划中隐含地遵循三个偏向，这些偏向促进了减少这些负担的词序选择，从而提高了生产流畅度。（2）这些选择在许多话语和个体中重复出现，从而塑造了语言中话语形式的分布。语言形式在很大程度上源于产生者试图减轻话语规划难度的主张，与其他将形式更多地归因于语言使用、语言习得过程或产生者试图创造容易被理解者理解的语言形式的理论形成对比。（3）语言感知者在其语言输入中隐含地学习统计规律，并利用这种先前的经验来指导对后续语言的理解。特别是，他们学会了根据先前遇到的输入的统计数据来预测语言信号的顺序结构。因此，理解行为的关键方面与语言中的词汇-句法统计数据有关，而这些统计数据又源于促进产生相对容易的话语形式而不是更困难的话语形式的话语规划偏向。这种方法与经典理论形成对比，经典理论将理解行为归因于语言理解系统的内在设计特征和相关工作记忆。PDC 理论相反，将理解的基本特征与不同的来源联系起来：即塑造语言形式的产生过程。
