A Stage Model of Reading and Listening

Abstract

Language processing is the abstracting of meaning from a physical signal such as a printed text of sequence of speech sounds. The goal of an information-processing model is to describe how language is processed, not simply what the reader or listener must know to understand language. Language processing is viewed as a sequence of internal processing stages or operations that occur between the language stimulus and meaning. The operations of a particular stage take time and transform the information in some way, making the transformed information available to the following stage of processing. In the present model the storage component describes the nature of the information at a particular stage of processing whereas the functional component describes the operations of a stage of processing. The information-processing model is used heuristically to incorporate data and theory from a variety of studies of language processing.