production of speech

Speech Production

Psycholinguistics

Aseel Kazum Mahmood

11th of March 2014

Overview

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).

Levelt’s Model (1989)

CONCEPTUALIZATION

How is speech initially conceptualized?

Where does the very beginning of any spoken utterance come from?

What sparks speech?

David McNeill’s Model: Conceptualization

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

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.

FORMULATION: THE EVENTUAL OUTPUT OF SPEECH CONCEPTUALIZATION

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.

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.

ARTICULATIONPrinting out human voices

Articulation processes

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?

Evolutionary modification: Larynx

the position of larynx/ why we have lower laynx? Low in human beings – high in other animals

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

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.

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.

Overlap of Planning and Production Cycles

SELF-MONITORINGWithin the process of printing

How do we know we self-monitor?

We correct our speech errors/mistakes immediately. Hesitation

What do we monitor?

Fact:

Native speakers do not make ‘errors’. They make ‘mistakes’. Non-native speakers make ‘errors’.

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

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.

Hesitations

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

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.

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).

-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

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

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

Thank you