1. Language production: methods ‘..an intrinsically more difficult subject to study than language comprehension’ Not susceptible to experimental study? Historically: observational methods Recently: experimental methods

2. Observational methods Analyses of spontaneous speech: –Researchers’ own corpora (e.g., Stemberger, 1985) –Publicly available corpora: Non-experimental (London –Lund - Svartvik & Quirk, 1980; Wall Street Journal; CHILDES – MacWhinney & Snow, 1990) Experimental (Map Task Corpus – Thompson et al., 1993). –Controlled experimental tasks: Berman & Slobin, 1994.

3. Observation: focus of study Distributional analyses Fluent speech: –Distribution of extraposed structures (Arnold, Wasow, Losongco & Ginstrom, 2000) –Distribution of thuh vs thee (Clark & Fox-Tree, 1997) –Distribution of reduced phonological forms (Bard et al., 2000) Disfluent speech: –Scope of utterance planning (Ford & Holmes, 1978; Beattie, 1983) –Error detection and correction (Levelt, 1983)

4. Focus of observational study (2) Speech errors –Pattern of errors (Stemberger, 1985) e.g. She saw him yesterday -> He saw her yesterday –Relative frequency of errors Problems: –Paucity of data phonological errors: 4> / 10,000 words –Bias/inaccuracies in corpus transcription: Transcriber bias/inaccuracy (Ferber, 1991) Distributional characteristics of language –Categorisation problems put the floor on the bags - floor/bags vs the floor/the bags

5. Experimental approaches Not prey to same problems as observational studies… Different problems instead! –Ecological validity experimental control vs free thought/expression –Controlling responses: Response specification - artificiality ‘Exuberant responding’ – loss of data

6. Specified elicitation Usually used when semantic/syntactic structure not of interest: –Responses specified in advance for given stimulus Picture naming Implicit priming (Roelofs & Meyer, 1998) –DOG > BONE –SAIL > BOAT –SAIL > WIND Array description (Smith & Wheeldon, 2001) –The fish and the star move apart –The fish moves up and the star moves down

7. Normative elicitation Stimuli designed to induce desired response: –Pictures of events/objects –Descriptions of objects ‘A very large mammal that swims in the sea and was widely hunted’ –Questions/fragments ‘The junior surgeon handed the senior surgeon….’

8. Potential problems Separating conceptual and linguistic influences: –manipulations may influence non-linguistic processing. Separating production and comprehension processes: –linguistic stimulus involves comprehension processes. Non-representative results: –Production of specified responses may involve different processes from normal production. –Normative elicitation may have power problem: too many discarded responses.

9. Manipulating messages ‘Simply describe’ (Osgood, 1971): –Event description: Ball rolling along table A/The ball is rolling along the table –Picture description: *o o* The star is above the circle The circle is above the star

10. Manipulating messages (2) –Picture description with context: Cued appearance of entity (Forrest 1993) Preceding linguistic context (Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000) –There was this old red scooter standing in a playground near a swing, with rusty wheels and scratched paint. What happened?

11. Manipulating messages (3) –‘Simply remember’ (Bock & Irwin, 1980) The psychologist treated a neurotic poodle. What happened to the neurotic poodle? > The neurotic poodle was treated by a psychologist.

12. Manipulating processes Basic idea: manipulate production processes. –Inhibit or facilitate particular processes Speech errors: –SLIP paradigm (Baars, Mackay & Motley, 1975): bash door bean deck darn bore > barn door –similar patterns to spontaneous speech –tongue-twisters, related-picture naming –agreement errors: (Bock & Miller, 1991) The key to the cupboards...

13. Manipulating processes (2) Normal speech: interference/priming effects: –facilitate/inhibit through prior/concurrent presentation of related stimuli. Prior presentation: –syntactic priming (Bock, 1986a) The rock star sold some cocaine to the undercover agent > The girl is handing a brush to the man –lexical priming (Bock, 1986b) SEARCH > The church is being struck by lightning

14. Manipulating processes (3) –Concurrent presentation: Picture-word interference: (Schriefers, Meyer & Levelt, 1990) BOOT how does distractor affect processing of stimulus?

15. Other insights into production Eye-tracking: –monitor eye-movements before/during speech to examine timecourse of utterance preparation, relationship between attention and speech etc. Griffin & Bock (2000)

16. Other insights into production (2) Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanning: –which areas of brain associated with different aspects of processing? Verb generation: semantically-driven lexical search (Petersen et al 1988) –CAKE > eat, bake, slice…. BUT: additional cognitive components? –Sequencing - TRUMPET > blow, make music, put away

17. Other insights into production (3) Event Related Potentials: –what is timecourse of processing? timelocked components: comprehension: N400 semantic anomaly effect: He drank his coffee with milk and dog –problem: contamination from articulatory muscles. –solution? Go-nogo method (Hagoort & van Turrenout, 1997).