The topic of attention in relation to language has the potential for uniting the efforts of linguists and cognitive psychologists. Our presentation will be oriented toward their relationship at the level of simple sentence planning and comprehension, since this is a critical level of modeling (cf. Meyer et al. 2006). Modeling the dynamics of focusing in discourse processing (cf. Kendon 1992; Stevenson, Crawley & Kleinman 1994; Chafe 1994; van Dijk 1997; Tomlin 1997; Stamenov & Andonova 1998; Myachykov & Posner 2005) should have as its basis the relationships between the structure of attention, awareness and sentence structure. We will consider the functioning of attention in normal language use only, although there is also an extensive literature on different issues of the pathology of attention in language use (cf. Widlöcher & Hardy-Bayle 1989; Bates et al. 1995; Chapman & Ulatowska 1997; Meyer et al. 2006 for further orientation).
References
Baddeley, A.
1989The uses of working memory. In P.R. Solomonet al. (eds.): 107–123.
Baddeley, A.
1995Working memory. In M. Gazzaniga (ed.): The cognitive neurosciences: 755–764. MIT Press. BoP
Baddeley, A.
2000The episodic buffer: a new component of working memory?Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4: 417–423.
Bates, E., Ch Harris, V. Marchman, B. Wulfeck & M. Kritchevsky
1995Production of complex syntax in normal ageing and Alzheimer’s disease. Language and Cognitive Processes 10: 487–539.
Burzio, L.
1986Italian syntax. Reidel.
Chafe, W.
1994Discourse, consciousness, and time. University of Chicago Press. BoP
Chapman, S. & H. Ulatowska
1997Discourse in Dementia: Consideration of consciousness. In M.I. Stamenov (ed.): 155–188.
Chomsky, N.
1990Accessibility ‘in principle’. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13: 600–601.
Chomsky, N.
1995The minimalist program. MIT Press.
Chomsky, N.
2005Three factors in language design. Linguistic Inquiry 36: 1–22.
Cowan, N.
2001The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24: 87–114.
Fauconnier, G. & M. Turner
2002The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. Basic Books. BoP
Fernandez-Duque, D., G. Grossi, I.M. Thornton & H.J. Neville
2003Representation of change: Separate electrophysiological markers of attention, awareness, and implicit processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 15: 491–507.
Jackendoff, R.
1990Semantic structures. MIT Press.
Jackendoff, R.
2002Foundations of language: Brain, meaning, grammar, evolution. Oxford University Press. BoP
Jonides, J. & E.E. Smith
1997The architecture of working memory. In M. Rugg (ed.) Cognitive neuroscience: 243–276. Psychology Press.
Kahneman, D.
1973Attention and effort. Academic Press.
Kendon, A.
1992The negotiation of context in face-to-face interaction. In A. Duranti & Ch Goodwin (eds.) Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon: 326–334. Cambridge University Press.
Koch, C. & N. Tsuchiya
2006The relationship between attention and consciousness Part I. Paper presented at the, 10th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, June 2006, St. Anne College, Oxford.
Langacker, R.
1987Foundations of cognitive grammar. Stanford University Press. BoP
Langacker, R.
1995Conceptual grouping and constituency in cognitive grammar. In Linguistic Society of Korea (ed.) Linguistics in the morning calm 3: 149–172. Hanshin.
Levinson, S.C.
1995Three levels of meaning. In F.R. Palmer (ed.)90–115. Grammar and meaning: Cambridge University Press.
Mandler, G.
1985Cognitive psychology: An essay in cognitive science. Lawrence Erlbaum.
Mandler, G.
1989Memory: Conscious and unconscious. In P.R. Solomonet al. (eds.): 84–106.
Mandler, G.
2002Consciousness recovered: Psychological functions and origins of conscious thought. John Benjamins.
Meyer, A., L. Wheeldon & A. Krott
(eds.)2006Automaticity and control in language processing. Psychology Press.
Myachykov, A. & M.I. Posner
2005Attention in language. In L. Itti, G. Rees & J. Tsotsos (eds.) Neurobiology of attention: 324–329. Academic Press/Elsevier.
Parasuraman, R.
(ed.)1998The attentive brain. MIT Press.
Pashler, H.E.
1997The psychology of attention. MIT Press.
Radford, A.
1997Syntactic theory and the structure of English: A minimalist approach. Cambridge University Press.
Sanford, A. & S. Garrod
1994Selective processing in text understanding. In M. Gernsbacher (ed.) Handbook of psycholinguistics: 699–719. Academic Press.
1997aGrammar, meaning and consciousness: What sentence structure can tell us about the structure of consciousness. In M.I. Stamenov (ed.): 277–342.
Stamenov, M.I.
(eds.)1997bLanguage structure, discourse and the access to consciousness. John Benjamins.
Stamenov, M.I. & E. Andonova
1998Lexical access and coreference processing in Bulgarian. In D. Hillert (ed.) Sentence processing: A cross-linguistic perspective: 167–181. Academic Press.
Stevenson, R., R.A. Crawley & D. Kleinman
1994Thematic roles, focus and the representation of events. Language and Cognitive Processes 9: 519–548.
Talmy, L.
1988Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cognitive Science 12: 49–100. BoP
Talmy, L.
1996The windowing of attention in language. In M. Shibatani & S. Thompson (eds.) Grammatical Constructions: Their Form and Meaning: 235–287. Oxford University Press.
Tomlin, R.S.
1997Mapping conceptual representations into linguistic representations: The role of attention in grammar. In J. Nuyts & E. Pederson (eds.) Language and Conceptualization: 162–189. Cambridge University Press.
Van Dijk, T.A.
1997Cognitive context models and discourse. In M.I. Stamenov (ed.): 189–226.
Vecchi, T. & G. Bottini
(eds.)2006Imagery and spatial cognition. Methods models and cognitive assessment. John Benjamins.
Widlöcher, D. & M. -C. Hardy-Bayle
1989Cognition and control of action in psychopathology. Cahiers dePsychologie Cognitive 9: 583–615.