Cognitive and neural constraints on theories of language production

This paper introduces a special issue on language production, which features work presented at the Seventh International Workshop on Language Production (New York, USA, July 2012). One key theme of the workshop was the importance of examining language production within the context of other cognitive domains and the need to consider multiple perspectives to understand how language production works. This approach to understanding production with respect to other cognitive domains is addressed in three papers in this volume, which focus on the interaction of theories of production with gesture; executive control and theories of speech perception. In addition, two papers focus on interaction among levels of production of lexical items. This includes an imaging investigation contributing to our understanding of a well-known effect on lexical retrieval and a review article on the representation of number. This introduction addresses some of the more general themes in these papers and in language production research more generally.