Language Production

In this paper we present a definition of Performance Grammar (PG), a psycholinguistically motivated syntax formalism, in declarative terms. PG aims not only at describing and explaining intuitive judgments and other data concerning the well--formedness of sentences of a language, but also at contributing to accounts of syntactic processing phenomena observable in language comprehension and language production. We highlight two general properties of human sentence generation, incrementality and late linearization, which make special demands on the design of grammar formalisms claiming psychological plausibility. In order to meet these demands, PG generates syntactic structures in a two-stage process. In the first and most important `hierarchical' stage, unordered hierarchical structures (`mobiles ') are assembled out of lexical building blocks. The key operation at work here is typed feature unification, which also delimits the positional options of the syntactic constituen...

A interação entre linguagem e cognição é, há muito tempo, foco de estudos linguísticos.  A linguagem é, em si, um sistema cognitivo, isto é, uma inteligência, capacidade, do cérebro humano. Nós, humanos, somos os únicos seres vivos que têm a capacidade de produzir e compreender uma língua e fazemos isso de forma inconsciente. É na mente humana que a linguagem é produzida e compreendida. Para descobrir o funcionamento da linguagem no cérebro humano, linguistas, psicolinguistas e neurocientistas da linguagem estudam a linguagem em diferentes dimensões. Linguistas teóricos procuram responder em que consiste o conhecimento linguístico na mente das pessoas, formulam teorias abstratas sobre quais são e como funcionam os conhecimentos linguísticos na faculdade humana da linguagem. Psicolinguistas são cientistas empíricos que investigam, através de métodos e técnicas experimentais, como as crianças adquirem uma língua natural e como esse conhecimento linguístico é posto em uso tanto por crianças quanto por adultos. Neurocientistas da linguagem estudam os mecanismos cerebrais que dão origem à linguagem humana, estudam o que acontece no cérebro humano quando a linguagem está em funcionamento e procuram responder quais são os fundamentos físicos e fisiológicos do conhecimento linguístico. Neste artigo, nos situamos na dimensão psicolinguística, que é o resultado da interface entre a Psicologia Cognitiva, área que estuda a natureza e o funcionamento da cognição humana, e a Linguística, área que estuda a linguagem.

Language is a very abstract phenomenon that linguistics have been studying for so long how it is processed in our brain. So, this essay elaborates in a very concise way what are the steps involved in producing language. What is more, it also analyses the reason why we tend to commit some errors while producing language.

Speakers show a remarkable tendency to align their productions with their interlocutors’. Focusing on sentence production, we investigate the cognitive systems underlying such alignment (syntactic priming). Our guiding hypothesis is that syntactic priming is a consequence of a language processing system that is organized to achieve efficient communication in an ever-changing (subjectively non-stationary) environment. We build on recent work suggesting that comprehenders adapt to the statistics of the current environment. If such adaptation is rational or near-rational, the extent to which speakers adapt their expectations for a syntactic structure after processing a prime sentence should be sensitive to the prediction error experienced while processing the prime. This prediction is shared by certain error-based implicit learning accounts, but not by most other accounts of syntactic priming. In three studies, we test this prediction against data from conversational speech, speech during picture description, and written production during sentence completion. All three studies find stronger syntactic priming for primes associated with a larger prediction error (primes with higher syntactic surprisal). We find that the relevant  prediction error is sensitive to both prior and recent experience within the experiment. Together with other findings, this supports accounts that attribute syntactic priming to expectation adaptation.

There have been theories concerning the role of prefabricated units in language production since the mid 1970s. Recent work in corpus linguistics has highlighted the importance of these fixed and variable units in speech and writing and has led to an awareness of the need to help language students learn and use these units appropriately. This paper outlines a teaching approach for oral ESP which inputs chunks of natural language orally which can be segmented by the learner into fixed and variable units and at the same time makes the learners aware of the paradigmatic, syntagmatic and phonological aspects of the language being taught. The teaching method makes extensive use of pictograms and ideograms as mnemonics and advance organizers to make language drills and practice meaningful by relating the language being taught to the learners' knowledge of the real world.

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) rarely produce wh-questions (e.g. “What hit the book?”) in naturalistic speech. It is unclear if this is due to social–pragmatic difficulties, or if grammatical deficits are also involved. If grammar is impaired, production of wh-questions by rote memorization might precede comprehension of similar forms. In a longitudinal study, 15 children with ASD and 18 initially language-matched typically developing (TD) toddlers were visited in their homes at 4-month intervals across a 3-year period. The wh-question task was presented via intermodal preferential looking. Silent “hitting” events (e.g. an apple hitting a flower) were followed by test trials in which the apple and flower were juxtaposed on the screen. During test trials, subject-wh- and object-wh-question audios were sequentially presented (e.g. “What hit the flower?” or ”What did the apple hit?”). Control audios were also presented (e.g. “Where's the apple/flower?”). Children's eye movements were coded off-line, frame by frame. To show reliable comprehension, children should look longer to the named item (i.e. apple or flower) during the “where” questions but less at the named item during the subject-wh and object-wh-questions. To compare comprehension to production, we coded 30-min spontaneous speech samples drawn from mother–child interactions at each visit. Results indicated that comprehension of subject- and object-wh-questions was delayed in children with ASD compared with age-matched TD children, but not when matched on overall language levels. Additionally, both groups comprehended wh-questions before producing similar forms, indicating that development occurred in a similar manner. This paper discusses the implications of our findings for language acquisition in ASD.

Comprehenders are sensitive to probabilistic distributions of linguistic events (Garnsey et al., 1997; Kamide et al., 2003; Konieczny, 2000; Staub and Clifton, 2006, inter alia). Expected words and structures are processed faster than unexpected ones. This raises the question whether syntactic production, too, is sensitive to probabilities of upcoming material. This thesis investigates cases of syntactic reduction, as in “I think (that) the commercial break is over”, where the word that can be omitted. I present evidence from corpus studies of spontaneous speech that syntactic reduction is more likely if the reduced constituent is predictable. Modern statistical regression models are used to guard against common challenges to corpus-based studies (such as clusters and multicollinearity). Taken together with evidence from phonetic reduction (in duration, formant quality, etc.; see, e.g., Aylett and Turk, 2004; Bell et al., 2003; van Son and Pols, 2003), phoneme omission (e.g. t/d deletion; see Bell et al., 2003; Gahl and Garnsey, 2004), and argument drop (Resnik, 1996), the evidence from syntactic reduction supports the Probabilistic Reduction Hypothesis (PRH): “Where grammar allows it, form reduction is more likely, the more redundant the information conveyed by the omitted form details is”. The PRH is compatible with production pressure (Ferreira and Dell, 2000, inter alia) and audience design accounts of reduction (Hawkins, 2004, inter alia). The results are also compatible with ‘uniform information density’ accounts (Aylett, 1999; Aylett and Turk, 2004; Genzel and Charniak, 2002): speakers may insert or omit that to avoid peaks or troughs in information density. Uniform information density accounts integrate both production and audience design accounts, as a uniform amount of information per time/unit optimizes successful information transfer while minimizing production effort. The same probabilities that I show to influence production are known to influence comprehension (Garnsey et al., 1997). Hence, the results may be taken to argue that language users’ representations of constituents contain probabilistic information. In short, knowledge of grammar may imply knowledge of probabilities (see Gahl and Garnsey, 2004). The final part of the thesis presents a new approach to studying what information speakers use to keep track of probabilistic distributions. In a first step, several predictability estimates of the same event are derived using different sets of cues or slightly different assumptions about what the relevant structure is that speakers keep track of. In a second step, these different predictability estimates are compared with regard to how much variation in syntactic reduction they account for. The results suggest that both structural and surface cues are used to keep track of the probability of structures and that speakers keep track of rather specific structures.

Until recently, written language and writing have been considered to be of minor interest in the context of cognitive and linguistic theories. Though the practical relevance of writing competences is undisputed, research in lan- guage production was, initially, research into speech production. This limita- tion was mainly due to the widespread opinion that spoken language is the exclusive domain of linguistics because of its 'naturalness', whereas written language was considered to be 'invented.' As a consequence, it was held to be more of a technical problem, e.g. in teaching, language policy or typogra- phy. This idea can be traced back to Saussurean linguistics: "Only the spo- ken word is the objective of linguistics." (Saussure 1967 2 : 28; our transla- tion). For several reasons the situation has changed over the last few years. Re- search in the history of writing systems has demonstrated that it is not just a matter of intentional acts of script refo...

Children’s speech develops over the first several years of their lives, and the specific language abilities are different from one year of age to another. Children in an elicited response experiment were found to have successively higher levels of language facility at successively higher ages, with specific exceptions for children who displayed language acquisition above the expected levels for their ages. The speech production abilities of children in this study roughly paralleled the speech perception of the same children. This study examined and compares the language production and the language perception of a group of children aged 1:3 to 5:11.

Speakers can produce utterances with more or less articulatory detail or even completely omit certain words, while still conveying the same message. Similar reduction exists at higher levels of linguistic representation, allowing—in the appropriate context—the omission of entire words or even phrases without loss of (near) meaning-equivalence. Such reduction lets speakers adjust the amount of information they provide in a given span of time or amount of signal. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part provides an empirical summary of psycholinguistics research on reduction and omission across levels of linguistic representation. We focus on the relation between signal reduction and the predictability of the message components encoded by that signal: speakers tend to reduce the signal of predictable message components. The second part of this chapter discuss possible explanations of this correlation. One type of explanation focuses on the attentional and memory pressures inherent to linguistic encoding. Another type of explanation focuses on the role of communicative goals in linguistic encoding. Finally, we discuss to what extent reduction is best explained in terms of changes to linguistic representations or biases operating during online language production.

The core niche for language use is in verbal interaction, involving the rapid exchange of turns at talking. This paper reviews the extensive literature about this system, adding new statistical analyses of behavioral data where they have been missing, demonstrating that turn-taking has the systematic properties originally noted by Sacks et al. (1974; hereafter SSJ). This system poses some significant puzzles for current theories of language processing: the gaps between turns are short (of the order of 200 ms), but the latencies involved in language production are much longer (over 600 ms). This seems to imply that participants in conversation must predict (or 'project' as SSJ have it) the end of the current speaker's turn in order to prepare their response in advance. This in turn implies some overlap between production and comprehension despite their use of common processing resources. Collecting together what is known behaviorally and experimentally about the system, the space for systematic explanations of language processing for conversation can be significantly narrowed, and we sketch some first model of the mental processes involved for the participant preparing to speak next.

Timing in turn-taking and its implications for processing models of language. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278036944_Timing_in_turn-taking_and_its_implications_for_processing_models_of_language [accessed Jun 12, 2015].

We provide evidence for a rational account of language production, Uniform Information Density (UID, Jaeger, 2006; Levy & Jaeger, 2007). Under the assumption that communication can usefully be understood as information transmission over a capacity-limited noisy channel, an optimal strategy in language production is to maintain a uniform rate of information transmission close to the channel capacity. This theory predicts that speakers will make strategic use of the flexibility allowed by their languages. Speakers should plan their utterances so that elements with high information are lengthened, and elements with low information are shortened, making the amount of information transmitted per time more uniform (and hence closer to the optimum). In three corpus studies, we show that American English speakers’ use of contractions (“you are”! “you’re”) follows the predictions of UID. We then explore further implications of UID for production planning. Keywords: language production; utterance planning; information theory; morphological reduction; contractions

A principle of efficient language production based on information theoretic considerations is proposed: Uniform Information Density predicts that language production is affected by a preference to distribute information uniformly across the linguistic signal. This prediction is tested against data from syntactic reduction. A single multilevel logit model analysis of naturally distributed data from a corpus of spontaneous speech is used to assess the effect of information density on complementizer that-mentioning, while simultaneously evaluating the predictions of several influential alternative accounts: availability, ambiguity avoidance, and dependency processing accounts. Information density emerges as an important predictor of speakers’ preferences during production. As information is defined in terms of probabilities, it follows that production is probability-sensitive, in that speakers’ preferences are affected by the contextual probability of syntactic structures. The merits of a corpus-based approach to the study of language production are discussed as well.

The article proposes a variant on Hengeveld’s Functional Discourse Grammar, dubbed Incremental Functional Grammar, in which the interpersonal and expression levels account for real-time processes. The interpersonal level analyses the Move as a sequence of Acts, each of which is composed of temporally successive Subacts. The role of the representational level, in this view, is that of a declarative grammar, providing semantic frames which organize focal and topical units into propositional form.