Attention and Language: A Linking Proposal

Abstract

Different chapters in this book presented how psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists have implicated the notion of attention in different language processes. While some have considered attention as a limited capacity system and a focusing device entity whose availability determines successful cognition and mental processing, others have looked at it as a mechanism that leads to comprehension, as in studies of eye movements in reading (Rayner 1998). In the studies of language production sustained selective attention has been shown to be important (Jongman et al. 2014). Thus, depending on the particular psycholinguistic task at hand, the role of attention has been examined. Yet others have examined how the very structure of language itself has attention properties (Levinson 2003; Talmy 2000). Attention has also been implicated in connection with language and vision interaction (Mishra 2009). However, it still remains unclear how attentional mechanisms set in during language processing and how these mechanisms are exploited by the language user during everyday tasks. Very little work has gone into examining attentional and goal-directed processing during actual language use in the broader context beyond simple laboratory-based tasks. In the remaining of this, Chap. 1 will also try to stress the fact that language use is linked to the intentional–conceptual (Hauser et al. 2002) system and, therefore, any understanding of language–attention interaction will include an understanding of how agents’ intentions critically determine the involvement of attention in any task.