Language processing is the abstraction of meaning from a physical signal, such as a sequence of speech sounds. Processing a spoken message requires a series of transformations that begin with the acoustic signal arriving at the ears and end with meaning in the mind of the listener. The goal of this information-processing model is to describe how speech is processed, not simply what the listener must know to understand speech. Language processing is viewed as a sequence of internal processing stages or operations that occur between stimulus and meaning. The operations of a particular stage take time and transform the information in some way, making the transformed information available to the following stage of processing. Two theoretical components or constructs are important in the model. First, the structural component describes the nature of the information at a particular stage of processing. Second, the functional component describes the operations of a stage of processing. The information-processing model is used heuristically to incorporate data and theory from a variety of studies of speech processing. (Author)