Publications

Publication details [#57039]

Athanasopoulos, Panos and Emanuel Bylund. 2013. The ‘thinking’ in thinking-for-speaking: Where is it? Language, Interaction and Acquisition 4 (1) : 91–100.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/lia

Annotation

According to the thinking-for-speaking (TFS) hypothesis, speakers of different languages think differently while in the process of mentally preparing content for speech. The aim of the present paper is to critically discuss the research carried out within the TFS paradigm, against the background of the basic tenets laid out by the proponents of this framework. It will show that despite substantial progress in the investigation of crosslinguistic differences in the organisation of information in discourse, the studies that actually examine the cognitive aspects of speech production are, to date, vanishingly few. This state of affairs creates a gap in our knowledge about the thought processes that co-occur with speech production during language use and acquisition. It will be argued that in order to reach a more comprehensive picture of the cognitive processes and outcomes of speech production, methodologies additional to the analysis of information organisation must be used.