Lecturer's Précis - Morton (1964)
"A Preliminary Functional Model for
Language Behaviour"
Copyright Notice: This material was
written and published in Wales by Derek J. Smith (Chartered Engineer). It forms
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First published online 08:35 BST 1st May 2002,
Copyright Derek J. Smith (Chartered Engineer). This version [2.0 - copyright] 09:00 BST 3rd July
2018.
An earlier version
of this material appeared in Smith (1997; Chapter 5). It is repeated here in
simplified form and supported with hyperlinks.
Morton (1964)
See firstly the supporting commentary for this material.
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Morton's
(1964) Pre-Logogen Model: Here is
Morton's (1964) model of the modular layout of the cognitive processes
involved in language. The central proposition is the mental dictionary (pink
box, centre). This contains storage units for all the words in the vocabulary
of the person concerned, but four factors may individually or in combination
influence the selection of a given word. From left to right across the top of
the diagram, these are ..... ·
confrontational sensory
input of written words, via the visual input pathway. ·
confrontational sensory
input of spoken words, via the auditory input pathway. ·
whatever else is
(or has recently been) going on in the person's mind, via the sentence
context pathway.
The chosen word
is then passed down into a short term memory store (bottom) in readiness to
be spoken. Note the bypass
arrows (blue, lower left). These allow non-words to be spoken without
reference to a pre-existing entry in the mental dictionary (for by definition
this contains only known words). However, the true complexity of this bypass
processing was not fully explored until the 1980s (see, for example, Ellis and Young, 1988). If this diagram fails to load automatically,
it may be accessed separately at |
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Redrawn from a black-and-white original in Morton (1964:218). This version Copyright © 2002, Derek J. Smith. |
References
Morton, J. (1964).
A preliminary functional model for language behaviour.
International Audiology, 3:216-225.
Smith, D.J.
(1997). Human Information Processing. Cardiff:
UWIC. [ISBN: 1900666081]