2025/12/30 by A. Benito Vicente, John Collins · 1 voice
Psychology · #Categorization, perception, and language #Cognitive and psychological constructs research #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition
paper · doi:10.1080/09515089.2025.2609897
openalex created_date 2025/12/30 · openalex publication_date 2025/12/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Speech production models typically assume that such production begins with the message that the speaker wants to convey. Such a message must be formatted in such a way that the other stages in speech production go swiftly, which means that it must be formatted according to the expressive demands and powers of the language that the speakers employ. Levelt and followers think that there can be a re-formatting stage that translates thoughts, couched in some other non-linguistic format, into messages. We argue that such a translation is particularly challenging, and propose an account of thinking that dispenses with the translation process. According to our proposal, linguistic creatures think in lexical concepts, that is, concepts that correspond to morphemes of the language they speak. Such lexical concepts are representations of sounds or of external signs that learners acquire in the process of word learning and are able to combine into phrases.