Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Table of Contents - 1999 - Volume 22, Issue 01  


Open Peer Commentary
Levelt et al.: Lexical access in speech production

Sharpening Ockham's razor

Anne Cutler a1 and Dennis Norris a2
a1 Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands anne.cutler@mpi.nl
a2 MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge CB2 2EF, United Kingdom dennis.norris@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk

Abstract

Language production and comprehension are intimately interrelated; and models of production and comprehension should, we argue, be constrained by common architectural guidelines. Levelt et al.'s target article adopts as guiding principle Ockham's razor: the best model of production is the simplest one. We recommend adoption of the same principle in comprehension, with consequent simplification of some well-known types of models.