Cognitive Science Perspectives on Phonetic Processing, Syntactic Parsing, and Semantic Integration
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.64229/p1qw4v42Keywords:
Language Comprehension, Phonetic Processing, Syntactic Parsing, Semantic Integration, Psycholinguistics, Interactive Processing, ERP, Predictive CodingAbstract
This article synthesizes cognitive science research on the core components of real-time language comprehension: phonetic processing, syntactic parsing, and semantic integration. Moving beyond modular, sequential models, we argue for a dynamic, interactive perspective where these processes operate in parallel, exerting continuous and bidirectional influences on one another. We first review the cognitive and neural mechanisms of early auditory-phonetic encoding, highlighting how pre-lexical speech segmentation interacts with top-down lexical and contextual knowledge. Next, we examine the cognitive architecture of syntactic parsing, exploring theories of working memory constraints, garden-path phenomena, and the role of probabilistic and frequency-based information in resolving structural ambiguity. The discussion on semantic integration focuses on the rapid incorporation of word meaning into a evolving mental representation, encompassing discourse context, world knowledge, and pragmatic inference. Crucially, this review dedicates significant analysis to the interfaces between these domains. We present evidence from behavioral paradigms (e.g., eye-tracking, self-paced reading), computational modeling, and cognitive neuroscience (esp. EEG/ERPs and fMRI) demonstrating that semantic plausibility can rapidly constrain syntactic analysis, and that syntactic structure guides semantic and thematic role assignment. We further explore the neural substrates underpinning this interplay, focusing on the spatiotemporal dynamics within the left perisylvian language network and domain-general executive control networks. The article concludes by advocating for an integrated cognitive science framework that views language comprehension as a unified predictive process, where phonetic input, syntactic structure, and semantic content are simultaneously evaluated and reconciled to construct a coherent interpretation. Future directions emphasizing individual differences, neurocomputational modeling, and cross-linguistic comparisons are outlined.
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