Psycholinguitics

1. Speech Production
Psycholinguistics
Aseel Kazum Mahmood
11th
of March 2014

2. Overview

3. Production :some basics
• Speech production is a process that begin when the talker
formulate the message in his/her mind to transmit to the
listener via speech. ( Rabiner& Juang 1993).
• Although There has been less research on language
production than on language comprehension. The
investigation of production is perceived to be more difficult
than the investigation of comprehension (Harley 2001).

4. Levelt’s Model (1989)

5. CONCEPTUALIZATION
How is speech initially conceptualized?
Where does the very beginning of any spoken utterance come from?
What sparks speech?

6. David McNeill’s Model: Conceptualization

7. Test of the model
 Synchronization test of image and speech
 Where’s my briefcase?
 There’s your briefcase.
 The problem with mentalism is The process of how
imagistic and syntactic thoughts are initially
conventionalized are unclear. But McNeil offers some
plausible evidence by saying that syntactic thought may
be generated by beginning with something
demonstrative. while imagistic thought might be of some
one pointing towards an object

8. Problems
 The process of how imagistic and syntactic thoughts are
initially conventionalized are unclear.
 For another, the illustrations he uses to describe how
gestures synchronize with important syntactic breaks in
spoken language are difficult to follow .
 perhaps it can be adequately illustrated by a videotape and
not by drawing.

9. FORMULATION:
THE EVENTUAL OUTPUT OF SPEECH
CONCEPTUALIZATION

10. How to observe the formulation
process
 First, how slips of the tongue (or the
computer keyboard) provide vivid insights
into our understanding of how speech is
formulated.
 Second, the power of priming in guiding the
direction of speech production.

11. What do speech errors tell us?
 Speech errors reveal possible processes of speech
formulation from thoughts to language.
 “Speech errors allow us to peek in on the production process because we
know what the speaker intended to say, but the unintentional mistake freezes
the production process momentarily and catches the linguistic mechanism in
one instance of production” (Scovel, 2009, p. 32).
 Speech is psychologically real.
 We make errors within the framework of language
structure.

12. ARTICULATION
Printing out human voices

13. Articulation processes

14. Three system of muscles
 Are the chest, the throat, and the mouth simply designed for
biological functions?
 To eat food
 To breathe the air
 To articulate speech?

15. Evolutionary modification: Larynx
 the position of larynx/ why we have lower laynx?
 Low in human beings – high in other animals

16. How do sounds pop out of the mouth after
conceptualization and formulation?
 Motor control of speech
 When an idea is conceptualized and linguistically
formulated, the brain commands the systems
responsible for speech production.
 One way to think of the motor commands, then,
is that they specify a series of target locations in
the vocal tract. It is a simplification, however, to
view articulation as the production of a series of
discrete sounds. Recall the concept of
coarticulation

17. Coarticulation
 Different speech organs work together to produce
sounds.
 Anticipatory co-articulation
 Boo [bu], bark [ba-]
 Perseveratory co-articulation
 Its [its]
 Dogs [z], cats [s]
 When an articulator, in anticipation of an
upcoming sound, aims for a given location, it
does not actually achieve it.

18. Planning and Production Cycles
 Low frequency words.
 Use of pauses.
 Use of gestures.
 such variables as morphological
 complexity, lexical ambiguity, age of acquisition,
and recency of usage (that is, priming) also influence
retrieval.

19. Overlap of Planning and
Production Cycles

20. SELF-MONITORING
Within the process of printing

21. How do we know we self-monitor?
 We correct our speech errors/mistakes immediately.
 Hesitation

22. What do we monitor?

23. Fact:
 Native speakers do not make ‘errors’. They make ‘mistakes’.
 Non-native speakers make ‘errors’.

24. Insights
 Speakers are intuitively aware of the production process.
 Speakers often self-edit or self-repair the output during the
process of production
 Competence vs. performance

25. Self-repairs (Levelt, 1989)
 Instant repairs
 Replace with the correct word
 Again left to the same blank crossing point-white crossing point.
 Anticipatory retracings
 The speaker retraces back to some point prior to the error.
 And left to the purple crossing point-the the red crossing point.
 Fresh starts
 Just start over
 From yellow down to brown-no-that’s red.

26. Hesitations
 Uh, um, let me see, you know, well.
 I think it costs about…uh….20 dollars.
 They must…uh…meet in the library.

27. Do we stop at any point of the
sentence?
 Hesitations are rule-governed.
 I think Mary is….you know…a pretty girl.
 They must…uh…meet in the library.

28. feedback loop
Du Bois (1974) has also analyzed several
different editing expressions as in:
(22) Bill hit him—hit Sam, that is(a
potentially ambiguous referent).
(23) I am trying to lease, or rather,
sublease, my apartment(nuance editing).
(24) I really like to—I mean, hate to—get
up in the morning( true erros).

30.  -concepts point you to lemmas. Lemmas point you to
morphological information you need to combine lemmas
into larger phrases
 Morphological encoding point you to speech sounds
(phonemes).
 -you need to express specific set of lemmas in specific
forms.
 Evidence for weaver ++
 -comes from three kind of studies:
 -speech errors.
 -tip of the tongue experience e(TOT)&picture naming and
picture-word inferences studies (Traxler, 2012).
Concepts in speech production

31.  The production of signs is important theoretically because it
gives us an opportunity to disentangle the cognitive
processes involved in translating thought into language from
the physical characteristics of our speech apparatus.
 errors occur in signing that strongly resemble those found
with speech.
 Independence of Parameters.
 Morpheme Structure Constraints.
 Speakers achieve differences in speech rate primarily by
varying the number of pauses, whereas signers vary the
duration of signed segments and both the duration and
number of pauses.
Insights from sign language

32.  Aitchison, J. (1998). The articulate mammal: An introduction to
psycholinguistics. London: Routledge.
 Caroll, D. (2003). Psychology of language,6th
ed.Thomson Wardsworth, Canada.
 Fields, J. (2004). Psycholinguistics: the key concepts. London: Rutledge.
 HARLEY, T. (2001). The Psychology of Language. Sussex: Psychology Press.
 Ladefoged, P. (1976). A course in phonetics. Newyork.
 Lieberman, P. (1967). Intonation, perception, and language. Cambridge: M.I.T.
Press.
 Rabiner, L. R., & Juang, B. H. (1993). Fundamentals of speech recognition.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J: PTR Prentice Hall.
 Scovel, T. (1998). Psycholinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Traxler, M. J. (2012). Introduction to psycholinguistics: Understanding language
science. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell
Refrences

33. Thank
you