SPEECH PRODUCTION

Book: Psycholinguistics

Author: John Field

Page: 283

Speaking, one of the most complex cognitive operations that human beings perform. A normal speech rate in English is around 150 words a minute. This means that a speaker retrieves two or three words per second from an everyday vocabulary of about 30,000. What is more, they continue to do so over very extended periods of time and with remarkable accuracy (about one slip per 1000 words).

 Studies of the pausing and hesitation patterns of speakers provide insights into the way speech is planned and executed. Pauses in connected speech occur mainly at the ends of major syntactic units, usually clauses. This suggests that a major unit of planning is the clause or (often the same thing) the phonological phrase.

 Research in speech production has aimed to identify the stages through which a speaker passes in assembling an utterance. Evidence has been sought in Slips of the Tongue (SOTs), inadvertent speech errors which, by showing us the system malfunctioning, can provide insights into the choices that a speaker makes. By examining a misplaced feature, it is sometimes possible to form conclusions as to the stage in the process when the feature was inserted into a partly assembled sentence. For example, in the SOT sequence the forks of the prong, the-s of forks is pronounced /s/ in conformity with the unvoiced nature of the /k/ at the end of fork. It must thus have been added after the transposition of fork and prong occurred.

Introspection and research have suggested that models of speech production need to incorporate the following stages:

A conceptual stage, where the proposition that is to be expressed is identified, but in abstract form.

A syntactic stage, where an appropriate frame is chosen, into which words are to be inserted. Evidence for this comes from SOTs such as She promised me to secrecy, where a syntactic frame seems to have been prepared for the word SWORE but the word PROMISED seems to have been substituted.

A lexical stage, where a meaning-driven search of the lexicon takes place, supported by cues as to the form of the target word. Once the lexical entry for a word is accessed, information about the word becomes available (its sense, collocational potential, phonology and morphology).

A phonological stage, where the abstract information gathered so far is converted into a speech-like form.

A phonetic stage, where features such as assimilation are introduced, and instructions are prepared to the muscles that control the articulators.

 In addition, a model of speech must allow for:

A forward-planning mechanism at discourse level which (for example) determines which parts of the message are to receive informational focus by way of intonation.

A buffer in which the whole of a planned clause can be held while the clause is being articulated.

A monitoring mechanism which enables a speaker to check their own speech for errors or for lack of clarity.

This outline of components represents a considerable simplification.

First, uncertainty arises as to the exact relationship between syntax and lexis. Current grammar theory views the two as closely interconnected. If one chooses the word PUT as the predicate (central element) of an utterance, then with the word come important syntactic constraints on the structure to be used (PUT X þ preposition on/in/into þ Y) as well as semantic constraints on what can fit into the X and Y slots. These constraints are said to be part of the lexical entry for the word PUT. It therefore seems that the lexical and syntactic operations involved in constructing an utterance must be closely interconnected and mutually supportive. In Garrett’s (1988) model of speech production, the situation is dealt with by bifurcation, with the two processes taking place in parallel.

It is also difficult to determine when certain features of connected speech are added into the plan. For example, lexical stress can only be marked once word forms have been retrieved from the lexicon. This means that sentence stress cannot be allocated until that moment, as it has to fall on the stressed syllable of one of the words. But surely the placing of sentence stress must be the outcome of an earlier decision at discourse level? A similar problem arises with the syntactic frame into which words are slotted. One might assume that it is already tagged for inflections such as-ed (past) or-s (plural). However, the forks of a prong example indicates that inflections are not added on until lexical items are already in place.

A favoured solution is to assume that in the early stages speech is assembled in an abstract preverbal form which has not yet been realised phonologically. We can thus mark a particular component of a proposition as due to receive semantic focus, without yet needing to specify the precise syllable that it will fall on. We can retrieve a lexical item in the form of an abstract meaning code without yet needing to attribute a phonological form to the word. And we can mark a position in a frame with some kind of abstract tag indicating that an inflection is needed (‘past’, ‘plural’) without yet specifying exactly what form the inflection takes. The inflection is given phonological shape only after the root has been inserted. Support for this version of events comes from the Tip of the Tongue experience where language users confidently state that a word exists and can specify the semantic range that it covers, but cannot retrieve its form. This suggests that a word’s lexical entry falls into two parts, one related to form and one related to meaning.

Levelt (1989) has produced the most detailed model of speech production. It incorporates three major processes– conceptualising, formulating and articulating. The Conceptualiser chooses a particular proposition, selects and orders the appropriate information and relates it to what has gone before. The Formulator translates this conceptual structure into a linguistic one. It first engages in a process of grammatical encoding which builds an abstract syntactic structure. This is followed by phonological encoding, in which the syntactic structure is tagged for inflection and is then given phonological form. Other processes specify the form and duration of the syllables as they are to occur in connected speech and add rhythm and prosody. The outcome of these operations is a phonetic or articulatory plan, a representation of how the planned utterance is to be articulated. It is temporarily stored in an articulatory buffer. The Articulator then retrieves chunks of internal speech from the buffer, unpacks them into sets of motor commands and issues the commands to the muscles controlling the larynx, the articulators and the respiratory system.

 See also: Articulation, Buffer, Lexical entry, Pausing, Planning: speech, Self-monitoring, Slip of the Tongue, Speech: unit of processing

Further reading: Levelt (1989)

اخر الاخبار

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The dictionary view

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The encyclopaedic view of meaning

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Semantic structure

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