Overview

Once a conceptual structure or part of it has been generated, the process of linguistic encoding can be initiated. This process can be subdivided into two successive stages:

Linguistic Encoding: The formulator converts the pre-verbal message into a linguistic string.

Both stages have constant access to the mental lexicon, the human word-store (to be treated in a separate unit). One issue in formulating is the question of internal feedback, i.e. a question of whether processing at the earlier stage of formulating (grammatical encoding) is influenced by the result or expectation of a later stage (phonetic planning) or vice versa.