Trends in Cognitive Sciences
ReviewModels of word production
Section snippets
Two kinds of model
All current models of word production are network models of some kind. In addition, they are, with one exception5, all ‘localist’, non-distributed models. That means that their nodes represent whole linguistic units, such as semantic features, syllables or phonological segments. Hence, they are all ‘symbolic’ models. Of the many models with ancestry in the speech error tradition6, 7, 8 only a few have been computer-implemented9, 10, 11. Among them, Dell’s two-step interactive activation model9
Conceptual preparation
The first step in accessing content words such as cat or select is the activation of a lexical concept, a concept for which you have a word or morpheme in your lexicon. Usually, such a concept is part of a larger message, but even in the simple case of naming a single object it is not trivial which lexical concept you should activate to refer to that object. It will depend on the discourse context whether it will be more effective for you to refer to a cat as cat, animal, siamese or anything
Lexical selection
In the chronometric tradition lexical selection has been studied with interference paradigms, in particular picture-word interference (see Box 1). The recurring finding has been that naming an object is slowed down when a distracter word is presented with the picture; the effect is stronger when the distracter word is semantically related to the target than when it is semantically unrelated and it is at maximum when picture and distracter word are presented simultaneously27. The WEAVER model
Morpho-phonological encoding
When you are planning the sentence ‘they are selecting me’, you must retrieve from your lexicon the morpho-phonological codes for each of the selected words, among them the two morpheme-size codes select and ing (see Fig. 3), and compute their syllabification and accent structure in context (se-léc-ting). This naturally divides the process into ‘code retrieval’ and ‘prosodification’.
Phonetic encoding and articulation
As incremental prosodification proceeds, the resulting syllabic and larger prosodic structures should acquire phonetic shape. As a speaker you will incrementally prepare articulatory gestures for the syllables in their prosodic context. A core feature of the WEAVER model is the notion of a syllabary51. Statistics show that native speakers of English or Dutch do 80 percent of their talking with no more than about 500 different syllables18 (although these languages have many more than 10 000
Conclusion
There is still a long way to go before the two research traditions emerging from speech error analysis and from naming chronometry are fully reconciled. But there has been lively and highly constructive interaction, leading to a much improved understanding of the processes involved in lexical selection and phonological encoding. One unifying force has been computational modeling. Current implemented models share their major strata, they are localist and symbolic; they compute quite similar
Outstanding questions
- •
How should error-based and chronometric models be further reconciled computationally and empirically?
- •
What causes a speech error? Is it caused by occasional cascading or occasional feedback in a normally non-cascading, feed-forward system? Is it the product of noise in a normally cascading interactive system? Or is the origin of speech error something else entirely?
- •
How does the word-production network relate to the word-perception network? How is self-monitoring realized in this combined system?
- •
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge helpful commentary by Antje Meyer and by Gary Dell.
References (57)
- et al.
Structure and content in language production: a theory of frame constraints in phonological speech errors
Cognit. Sci.
(1993) - Stemberger, J.P. (1985) An interactive activation model of language production, in Progress in the Psychology of...
Linguistic Structure and Change
(1998)- et al.
Categorical interference and associative priming in picture naming
Br. J. Psychol.
(1990) - et al.
From lexical concepts to lexical items
Cognition
(1992) A case for nondecomposition in conceptually driven word retrieval
J. Psycholinguist. Res.
(1997)Phonological faciliation of semantic errors in normal and aphasic speakers
Lang. Cognit. Process.
(1996)Grossberg and colleagues solved the hyperonym problem over a decade ago
Behav. Brain Sci.
(1999)- et al.
Brain activity during speaking: from syntax to phonology in 40 milliseconds
Science
(1998) - G. Vigliocco, et al., Is ‘count’ and ‘mass’ information available when the noun is not?: an investigation of...
Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology
Metrical structure in planning the production of spoken words
J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cognit.
Models of speech production
The functional anatomy of word comprehension and production
Trends Cognit. Sci.
The Science of Words
Slips of the tongue in the London–Lund corpus of spontaneous conversation
Linguistics
Speaking: From Intention to Articulation
Language production: a blueprint of the speaker
The Organization of Perception and Action: A Theory for Language and other Cognitive Skills
A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production
Psychol. Rev.
Phonological activation of semantic competitors during lexical access in speech production
Lang. Cognit. Process.
The role of inhibition in a spreading-activation model of language production: II. Simulational perspective
J.
Psycholinguist. Res.
Lexical access in aphasic and non-aphasic speech
Psychol. Rev.
Semantic and phonological codes interact in single word production
J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cognit.
An interactive activation approach to object processing: effects of structural similarity, name frequency and task in normality and pathology
Memory
Time course analysis of the Stroop phenomenon
J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform.
Cited by (423)
Speaking to remember: Model-based adaptive vocabulary learning using automatic speech recognition
2024, Computer Speech and LanguageLinguistic features of stuttering during spontaneous speech
2023, Journal of Fluency DisordersInfants aged 12 months use the gender feature in determiners to anticipate upcoming words: An eye-tracking study
2023, Journal of Child LanguageProfiles of word-finding difficulties in school-aged children
2023, Journal of Child LanguageAn Information-Theoretic Account of Availability Effects in Language Production
2024, Topics in Cognitive ScienceAutomating intended target identification for paraphasias in discourse using a large language model
2023, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research