Mais B. Mayyas2013230024Psycholinguistics English 627Prof. Lutfi Abulhaija

October 12, 2014

Properties of spoken language productionWhat is linguistics?What is psycholinguistics?

The primary processes investigated in psycholinguisticsGenerating wordsBasic steps of word productionSelecting a content wordGenerating function words and morphemesAssembling the sound of a wordTime course processes in word production

Language Production

Language production refers to the process involved in creating and expressing meaning through language.

Major steps of language production

Conceptualization

Psycholinguists generally agree that some form of mentalese exists--- a representation system which is different from language. The notion is that thoughts take form in mentalese and are then translated into linguistic form, but there is little agreement as to the properties of this prelinguistic mental representation.

Formulation

• Formulation is much easier to describe than conceptualization because analysis on eventual output of the process, such as speech errors, and the choice of words or sentence structures can be a great help for understanding speech production.

• Word processing Sound processing lemmas, lexical entries forms, morphemes

Articulation• Articulation of speech sounds is the third and a very important stage of

production. Once we have organized our thoughts into a linguistic plan, this information must be sent from the brain to the muscles in the speech system so that they can then execute the required movements and produce the desired sounds.

• We depend on vocal organs to produce speech sounds so as to express ourselves. In the production of speech sounds, the lungs, larynx and lips may work at the same time and thus form co-articulation.

• The process of speech production is so complicated that it is still a mystery in psycholinguistics though psycholinguists have done some research with high-tech instruments and have known much about speech articulation.

Self-regulation

• Self-regulation is the last stage o f speech production. To err is human. No matter who he is, he would make mistakes in conversationor in writing. So each person would do some self-corection over and over again while conversing.

Basic steps of word production

• Property 1: Word selection precedes sound assembly:Analyses of errors

Errors• (1) in Shifts, one speech segment disappears from its appropriate place

and appears somewhere else.• e.g. That’s so she’ll be ready incase she dicide to hits it.

(decides to hit it).

• (2) Exchanges are, in fact, double shifts, in which two linguistic units exchange places.

• e.g. Fancy getting your model resnosed. (getting your nose remodeled).

• (3) Anticipations occur when a later segment takes the place of an earlier one. They are different from shifts in that the segment that intrudes on another also remains in its correct place and thus is used twice.

• Bake my bike. (take my bike).

• (4) Perseverations appear when a earlier segment replaces a later item.• He pulled a pantrum. (tantrum).• • (5) Additions add linguistic material.• I didn’t explain this clarefully enough. (carefully enough).

(6) Deletions leave something out.I’ll just get up and mutter intelligibly. (unintelligibly).

(7) Substitutions occur when one segment is replaced by an intruder. These are different from the previously described slips in that the source of the intrusion may not be in the sentence.At low speeds it’s too light. (heavy).

(8) Blends apparently occur when more than one word is being considered and the two intended items “fuse” or blend into a single item.That child is looking to be spaddled. (spanked\paddled).

Selecting a content wordProperty 2: The intention to produce a word activates a

family of meaning related words

• Cat rat mouse قطة فأر• Behavior, deportment, manner

behortment

How is meaning represented in models of word production?

• Decompositional theory:• Has wings has feathers sing

Birds Airplane, opera singer

Property 3: Words that express similar meanings compete for selection:

• A: Error analysis indicates that words that share the grammatical class, taxonomic category and level of specifity with the intended word compete for selection:

colder windy He knows nothing(at all/whatever)

coldy and winder He knows nothing at ever

• B: Speakers take longer to label objects, actions or colors in the presence of semantically related distracters:

What do cows drink? Animal horse mare

WEAVER++:

• The timing of the word selection is influenced by two factors :

• A: The activation of the to-be selected word relative to all other activated lexical representations in a response set (p27).

• B: Critical difference: a lexical representation can only be selected if its activation exceeds the activation of all other representations by some minimum amount.

When naming a picture, the lexical representation of other words will be activated by distractor words and semantic relationships

bed table fish dog

Property 4: Competition for selection is constrained by grammatical class and contextual features:

Property 5: The speed and accuracy of selection is affected by specific meaning-level properties:

A: The concreteness or imageability of the word:Concrete vs. AbstractVampire, key, book sense, fear, spiritB: Sentence context influences the speed of

word selection through the influence of a combination of pragmatic, semantic and syntactic constraints.

Property 6: Attended objects do not necessarily lead to lexical activation:

• Some models predict that seeing the object activates the word:

• bananaAnd viewing a semantically related object

facilitates production relative to viewing an unrelated object:

banana

• Phonological information about ignored objects becomes available:

e.g. Speakers are faster to name a cat in the presence of a phonological distracter such as “cap” but not “shoe”

cap

Property 7: Selecting words is subject to long-term repetition effects that resemble learning:

e.g. calling a giraffe a “zebra” after correctly naming a zebra

e.g. friends

Property 8: Word production can halt part of the way through the process:

A: Slips of the tongue: A mistake in speaking, usually trivial, sometimes amusing.

Frish gotto for (fish grotto) tup of tea ('cup') the most highly played player for ('paid')

B: TOT• What is the tip-of-the tongue phenomenon?• The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is characterized by being able to retrieve

quite a lot of information about the target word without being able to retrieve the word itself.

• You know the meaning of the word. You may know how many syllables the word has, or its initial sound or letter. But you can’t retrieve it all. This experience is coupled with a strong feeling (this is the frustrating part) that you know the word, and that it is somehow kept in your brains. When you eventually remember it, the experience is often as erratic and abrupt as the initial failure — typically it pops up later when you don not need it anymore!

• The tip-of-the tongue phenomenon probably occurs, because of a weaker connection between the meaning a word its phonetical realization (the sound)

How do we explain TOT phenomenon:

• WEAVER++

• Node Structure Theory

Generating function words and morphemes:Property 9: The selections of some words and morphemes is not

primarily driven by meaning:

• A:They are mainly driven by grammatical and phonological properties rather than meaning.

a/ an/some pasta? Some pasta vs. a noodleB: There is an important dissociation between

content- and function word production.C: Function words participate in speech errors in

different ways than content words do

Assembling the sounds of a word:Property 10: The sounds of a word are

assembled anew:A:When speakers name isolated objects, errors involving the sounds of words are much less likely than word substitution errors :a. John dropped his cup of coffee... Cuff coffeeb. also share --alsho share alsoc. such observation -- sub – such B: the sounds are assembled anew is due to changes in metrical structure contingent on the accompanying words and inflections:HandHand it “han- dit”

Property 11: Experince strongly affects speed and accuracy of assembling sounds:

In slips of the tongue, words fall apart in ways that reflect the sequences of sounds that the speaker is familiar with rather than createg novel sequences of sounds (lexical bias).

The sounds that slip tend to be those in the least predictable positions within the language of the speaker (/b/ in bisycle is less predictable than other consonants that begin syyllables in English (e.g. /s/ and /k/)

• Short term experience with particular sound-ordering conventions affects the likelihoods of making different types of errors.

• fox

Children tend to learn common words rather than uncommon ones:

• The meanings and initial stages of word production differ for generating homophones:

• Ball(spherical object) vs. ball( a formal dance)

And homophones make TOT and slips less likely to happen.

Property 12: Aspects of sound assembly proceed sequentially:

• Processing seems to star earlier in time for sounds at the starts of words than for sounds at ends.

Tile, tie, liar, timer, player, fox

Property 13: The effect of similar sounding words is highly situation-dependent:

• The effect of recent experience with a word that is phonologically similar to an intended word sometimes speeds and sometimes slows word production.

OnomatopoeiaThe sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick.

Time course processes in word productionProperty 14: Semantic competitors activate their sounds

• Slips of the tongue• one may use "stop" to mean "start" because of the bottom-up

activation of /st/• Errors: when the target word is "cat", the activated phonemes

of "cat" cascade to other phonemes in other related words, that means /k/, /æ/ and /t/ may activate other nodes with similar phonemes such as "rat" which is activated more than other related nodes such as "dog" that does not activate its "phonological codes“

• Cascading activation: couch , sofa cofa• Cat, rat, dog, mouse rat for cat• Speakers are also faster to read aloud words that are

phonetically related to dispreferred synonyms of object names (e.g. soda for sofa)

Property 15: The scope of messages planning is greater than the scope of sound assembly

• Although speakers seem to know a lot about the message content of an utterance before they begin to speak, they often do not know all words they will use to express the message before they begin to articulate the utterance. They plan messages further in advance than they retrieve sounds.