The Location of Words: Evidence from Generation and Spatial Description

Language processing architectures today are rarely designed to provide psychologically plausible accounts of their representations and algorithms. Engineering decisions dominate. This has led to words being seen as an incidental part of the architecture: the repository of all of language’s idiosyncratic aspects. Drawing on a body of past and ongoing research by myself and others I have concluded that this view of words is wrong. Words are actually present at the most abstract, pre-linguistic levels of the NLP architecture and that there are phenomena in language use that are best accounted for by assuming that concepts are words.