2011 Volume 31 Issue 2 Pages 181-190
Information processing involved in the auditory comprehension of language is reviewed. The process begins with capturing word sounds in which meanings are encoded and ends with the decoding of meanings from these word sounds. From the cognitive neuropsychological standpoint, the process of auditory comprehension of language can be divided into five steps, i. e., (1) capturing vocal sounds from the outside world by the brain (word sound processing), (2) categorization of the vocal sounds and matching them to templates (Japanese phonemes), (3) lexical/semantic processing, (4) parsing, and (5) analysis of discourse. In this article, the underlying mechanisms and neural correlates of each step are discussed. When the logogen model designed for English (a syllabic language) is applied to Japanese mora language for the purpose of explaining the mechanisms of information processing in Japanese, some discrepancies arise. Accordingly, a new logogen model for Japanese as mora language is proposed.
