Attention and language

Maxim I. Stamenov & Elena Andonova
Table of contents

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. Modeling the dynamics of focusing in discourse processing (cf. Kendon 1992; Stevenson, Crawley & Kleinman 1994; Chafe 1994; van Dijk 1997; Stamenov & Andonova 1998) should have as its basis the relationships between the structure of attention and sentence structure. We will consider the functioning of attention in normal language use only, while 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 for further orientation).

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