The models that we shall consider in this chapter have their roots in work that has already been discussed. They are closely related to connectionist models, and they take one step further the type of model of language–brain relationships that is found in the connectionist literature. The models to be considered in this chapter may be called “process models”, because the fundamental insight which motivates the development of these models is the view that the usual functions of language – speech, comprehension, reading, writing – are processes which can be further sub-divided into constitutent parts. We have seen that this view was incorporated into the models of nineteenth-century connectionist aphasiologists (Chapter 4) and their twentieth- century successors (Chapter 5). Both Wernicke and Lichtheim, for instance, argued that, in the process of speaking, the auditory representations of words were accessed in the temporal association areas and conveyed to the motor area for speech in the left frontal lobe. In other words, Wernicke and Lichtheim appreciated that there were different inputs into the final stages of motor planning of speech. The view that overt behavior is the result of the interaction and integration of various component processes was thus incorporated into connectionist models in a limited way. The limitations of the “processing” analyses in connectionist literature can be seen in the small number of operations mentioned in the models we discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, and in the fact that certain tasks, such as word recognition (carried out in Wernicke's area), have no internal components.

The models that we shall consider here extend the processing account of language use to all tasks.