Modularity Hypothesis

The Modularity Hypothesis

Fodor’s proposal that some cognitive processes, in particular language and perception, operate on only certain kinds of inputs and operate independent of the beliefs and other information available to the cognitive processor or other cognitive processes.

A proposal from the philosopher Jerry Fodor (1983, 1985) made a quite different argument about the relationship of language to other aspects of cognition.

Fodor argued that some cognitive processes—in particular, perception and language—are modular. What does it mean for a process to be a module? First, it means the process is domain-specific: It operates specifically with certain kinds of input and not others. With regard to language, for example, Fodor argued that sentence parsing involves processes that are specific to the division of phrases and words into constituents. Such processes are meant only for parsing and are of little use in other cognitive tasks.

Modularity of a process also implies that it is an informationally encapsulated process: It operates independently of the beliefs and the other information available to the processor.

The modularity hypothesis, then, argues that certain perceptual and language processes are modules. (In the case of language, one such process is that which parses input utterances.) These processes are thought to be set apart from other cognitive processes, such as memory, attention, thinking, and problem solving, that are thought to be nonmodular. Modular processes operate automatically and independently (at least at the first stages of processing) of other cognitive processes, such as thought. Modular processes are domain specific, which means that they are specialized to work with only certain kinds of input. The syntactic parsing aspects of language are not used in other kinds of cognitive processing. In this sense, then, language really is a special and very independent cognitive process.

The experiment by Swinney (1979) on lexical ambiguity resolution offers findings that support the modularity hypothesis.