1. Production of Speech and Language
Psycholinguistics – 6th Meeting

2. Stages of Language Production
Conceptualizing a thought
Formulating a linguistic plan
Articulating/implementing the plan
Self-monitoring

3. Slips of the Tongue
A speech error, commonly referred to as a slip of the tongue, is a deviation (conscious or unconscious) from the apparently intended form of an utterance.
Errors in speech production and perception are also called performance errors.
Speech errors are made on an occasional basis by all speakers. They occur more often when speakers are nervous, tired, anxious or intoxicated.

4. Charles F. Hockett explains that "whenever a speaker feels some anxiety about possible lapse, he will be led to focus attention more than normally on what he has just said and on what he is just about to say. These are ideal breeding grounds for stuttering.“

5. Spoonerism
Example of a “chronic sufferer” is Reverend William Archibald Spooner, whose peculiar speech may be caused by a cerebral dysfunction.
Pardon madam, this pew is occupied  Mardon padam, this pie is occupewed
Is the dean busy  Is the bean dizzy?
You have missed my history lecture  You have hissed my mystery lectures
The Lord is a shoving leopard

6. Types of Speech Errors
Shift: the speech unit (an affix here) moves to a different location.
ex: she decides to hit it  she decide to hits it
Exchange: 2 units swap positions
ex: Katz and Fodor  Fats and Kodor
Anticipation: a speech unit is activated too early.
ex: take my bike  bake my bike
Perseveration: an earlier segment replaces a later item
ex: pulled a tantrum  pulled a pantrum

7. Addition: a unit is added.
ex: carefully enough  clarefully enough
Deletion: a unit is deleted
ex: plastic  plattic
Substitution: a unit is changed into a different unit
ex: the place opens  the place closes
Blend: 2 speech units are combined
ex: grizzly + ghastly  grastly

8. Most types of errors can occur on most linguistic units
Segments
Segment
Target
Error
Distinctive or phonetic features
clear blue sky
glear plue sky (voicing)
Phonemes or sounds
ad hoc
odd hack
Sequences of sounds
spoon feeding
foon speeding
Morphemes
sure
unsure
Words
I hereby deputize you.
I hereby jeopardize you.
Phrases
The sun is shining./The sky is blue.
The sky is shining.

9. Regularities in Speech Errors
Speech errors are not random
Elements that interact with one another tend to come from similar linguistic environments.
Initial : beast of burden  burst of beaden
Middle : pigeon putterdowner  poojin pitter-downer
final : night life [nait laif]  nife lite [naif lait]

10. Regularities in Speech Errors
Elements that interact with one another tend to be similar to one another.
sesame seed crackers  Sesame Street crackers (consonants exchanged with consonants - phonetic similarity)
van  bus (semantic similarity)

11. Regularities in Speech Errors
Slips obey the phonological rules of the language
slick + slippery  slickperry (*slickppery, *slipkery)
cooked a roast ([kukt])  roasted a cook ([rostd])
Speech errors reveal consistent stress patterns

12. Regularities in Speech Errors
Perseverations (repeating previously occurring segments) are more frequent with unfamiliar phrases, anticipations with familiar ones
Perseverations are more common than anticipations in aphasics than in normal adults.

13. Explanation of Speech Errors
Freudian view:
- errors occur because we have more than a single plan for production and that one such plan competes with and dominates the other.
- errors reflect intrusion from repressed thoughts – the slip results in a word of emotional significance (Last night my grandmother lied [died])
Psycholinguistic view:
- we produce speech through a series of separate stages, each devoted to a single level of linguistic analysis. Errors typically occur at one level, but not others, during the production process.
- errors reflect planning or implementation errors in normal language use

14. Serial Models of Linguistic Planning: Fromkin
Stage 1 - Identify meaning to be conveyed
Stage 2 - Select syntactic structure
Stage 3 - Generate intonation contour
Stage 4 - Insert content words into slots
Stage 5 - Add function words and affixes
Stage 6 - Specify phonetic segments

15. Assumptions of Serial Models
Independence of planning units
- most speech errors occur at only one level of planning, leaving other levels intact
Stop beating your brick against a head wall.
(Stop beating your head against a brick wall.)
Here, only Stage 4 - inserting content words into slots - is affected

16. Sequence of planning units
- accommodation process – pronunciation of shifted elements reflects the new environment
It certainly run outs fast. (runs out)
[s vs. z pronunciation]

17. Parallel Models
Multiple levels of processing take place simultaneously (Dell; Bock & Levelt)
Four levels of nodes in memory: semantic, syntactic, morphological, and phonological
Each node produces its own separate representation of the intended message.
These representations work in parallel.
Thus, as one node at one level is activated, it may activate other nodes at same or at other levels through spreading activation.

18. Implementing Linguistic Plans
ARTICULATING
Three systems of muscles:
a) respiratory
- regulates flow of air from lungs to vocal tract
b) laryngeal (vocal cords)
- responsible for distinction between voiced and voiceless sounds, and for pitch
c) supralaryngeal (vocal tract – tongue, lips, teeth, jaw and velum)
- manipulate size and shape of oral and nasal cavity

19. Self-Monitoring of Speech
Self-repairs - three stages
a) we interrupt ourselves after detecting an error
b) we utter an editing expression - eg “uh” or “I mean”
c) we repair the utterance

20. Self-interruptions
self-interruptions are usually made soon – e.g. at first word boundary after the error.
We can go straight on to the ye-, to the orange node
Straight on to green – to red
And from green left to pink – er from blue left to pink

21. Editing Expressions
The type of editing expression used is not arbitrary
(1) “uh” vs. “oh”
I saw…uh..12 people at the party.  try to remember the exact number
I saw…oh…12 people at the party.  try to choose a number that was approx. correct
(2) “that is” (disambiguate) vs.“rather” (nuance) vs. “I mean” (to say opposite)