In auding, then, the auder presumably decodes the spoken message by use of previously acquired skill in programming articulatory movements. The languaging mechanisms for both representing and comprehending conceptualizations in spoken form are thus considered to be the same: the formation of internal articulatory programs. It is not, however, necessary that these programs be executed-that is, the programming may take place without an "execute" or "speak" command being issued. This may indeed happen during the "inner speech" of silent reading, about which more will be said later.

It is not clear exactly how the developing child learns to produce and comprehend the speech around him. We know, though, that the infant has ample opportunity to produce syllables and to listen to them immediately afterwards. Thus a feedback loop exists between the child's articulatory programming and his auditory reception. It seems likely that the child first auds his own speech. In this way, the internal articulatory programming would develop to produce certain syllabic sound patterns (ie., structured information in the environmental display) which could then be picked up by the ear, stored in SIS, scanned by attention, and compared to the same program just used to produce the pattern of sound to obtain a match. We know in fact that children do repeatedly form the same syllables in their babbling, and so we can guess that their focus of attention may be on the structured information in auditory SIS produced by their own articulatory programs.

Thus the child may come to "seek" structured information in the environment similar to that he produces himself through articulating. If now the parents begin imitating the child, which we saw in Chapter III appears feasible, resulting in words like papa and mama, the child can analyze this structured information in terms of his own articulatory programs to find a match. While this may, in the early stages of learning, require the full focal attention of the child, with extensive practice the speech decoding skills of the child reach the level of automaticity. In fact, this may happen for the most part before the child starts using language for communication. Once these decoding skills are automatic, focal attention may then shift to the task of conceptualizing and learning the conventionalized signs for representing conceptualizations in language, as discussed in Chapter III.