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Language Language productionproduction
Holly BraniganHolly Branigan
Email: Email: [email protected]@ed.ac.ukOffice: US46 Office: US46
Office hour: Mon 10-11Office hour: Mon 10-11Psychling coffee hour: Wed 11-12Psychling coffee hour: Wed 11-12
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Course overviewCourse overview
Overview of the production systemMethodological issuesLexical accessSyntactic encodingBeyond the sentence…
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OverviewOverview What does production involve? Methodological challenges:
– Studying comprehension vs production Approaches:
– Observational approaches Advantages/disadvantages
– Experimental approaches Challenges: controlling input and output Two classes of methods:
– Manipulating pathways (altering processor’s state)– Manipulating message
– Neurophysiological approaches
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BackgroundBackground
Production forms half of language ability:– Input to comprehension– More difficult problem than comprehension?
e.g. Evidence from 1st & 2nd language acqn
The problem:– Expressing non-ordered conceptual message
via ordered array of sounds.– But: under several constraints, in real time.
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What we What we don’tdon’t do doH: How much money is there in my current account and in my deposit account?
<SILENCE>
H: Hello?<SILENCE>
C: Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
H: How much money is there in my current account and in my deposit account?
<SILENCE>
C: Your current a-ccount encompasses two hundred pounds. I cannot access how..<SILENCE>.. in your deposit account
money much is there.
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Undesirable featuresUndesirable features
Meaningless and irrelevant content. Long silences, strange pausing. Infelicities of vocabulary and structure:
– ‘Your current account encompasses £200’– ‘I cannot access how in your deposit
account money much is there.’ Strange intonation and pronunciation:
– ‘Your current a-ccount’– ‘Sleeeeeep’
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What we What we do do dodo
Speakers must produce utterances with:– Appropriate meaningful content;– Appropriate lexical items;– Appropriate syntax - grammatical and
appropriate word order and structure;– Appropriate pronunciation, intonation, and
phrasing. And they must do this fluently, in real
time.
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Getting the form rightGetting the form right
Speakers have to get every aspect of the form right, whether or not germane to message.– cf. Hearers - details of form can
sometimes (often?) be ignored (e.g. missing words, not paying attention).
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Getting the content wrongGetting the content wrong Paradox: adept at getting form right but content
wrong:– Subject-verb agreement errors
e.g. The report about the fires are very long Less than 5% errors in expmt designed to elicit them (Bock &
Miller 1991).
– Serious structural anomalies (unparseable) 0.5% utterances (Deese 1984).
– Sound/word errors (Garnham et al 1982): Sound errors 3.2/10,000 words Word errors 5.1/10,000 words
– Can you put the desk back on my book when you’ve finished with it?
– It’ll get fast a lot hotter if you put the burner on.
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Doing it in timeDoing it in time Strongest constraint may be fluency:
– have to get form right under time pressure.
Incrementality:– ‘Work with what you’ve got’– Flexibility: allows speaker to say something
quickly, also respond to changing environment.
Modularity:– ‘Work only with what you’ve got’– Regulate flow of information.
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An outline of An outline of sentence productionsentence production
Three broad stages: – Conceptualisation
deciding on the message (= meaning to express)
– Formulation turning the message into linguistic representations Grammatical encoding (finding words and putting them
together) Phonological encoding (finding sounds and putting them
together)
– Articulation speaking (or writing or signing)
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Methodology: BackgroundMethodology: Background
‘..an intrinsically more difficult subject to study than language comprehension’ – Not susceptible to experimental study?
Solutions:– Evidence from other disciplines
e.g., social psychology, linguistics, AI…
– Cognitive psychology: Historically: observational methods Recently: experimental methods
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What’s the problem?What’s the problem? Comprehension:
– Can control input precisely– Moving from language to conceptual representation
e.g., understanding anaphora: participants read same texts; measure reading times
Production:– How do we control input?– Moving from (unobservable) conceptual representation to
language e.g., when participants produce anaphora, do they do so on the
same basis?
BUT: end product is observable in production but not comprehension
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MeasuresMeasures What people say:
– Under which circumstances do they produce particular words, utterances etc
– May be intended, or may be errors– How frequently do they do this
Timecourse:– How quickly do people produce language
Neurophysiological:– How is language production represented in the
brain?
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Observational methods: Observational methods: Analyses of spontaneous speechAnalyses 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 (controlled features)(Map Task Corpus – Thompson et al., 1993).
– Controlled experimental tasks: Berman & Slobin, 1994.
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Observation: Observation: Distributional analysesDistributional analyses
Fluent speech:– Sentence types, verb forms, prosodic markers etc (Deese,
1984)
– 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)
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Observational analyses of Observational analyses of disfluenciesdisfluencies
Speech errors– Pattern of errors (Stemberger, 1985)
– Relative frequency of errors
Problems:– Paucity of data
errors = 3% self-interruptions (Blackmer & Mitton, 1991)
– Bias/inaccuracies in corpus transcription: Transcriber bias/inaccuracy (Ferber, 1991) Distributional characteristics of language
– Categorisation problems
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Experimental approachesExperimental approaches
Not prey to same problems as observational studies:– Reduces observer bias; – isolates phenomenon of interest; – increases potential for systematic observation.
Different problems!– How to control input and output?– Input: ecological validity problem (‘controlling
thoughts’)– Output: controlling responses:
response specification - artificiality ‘exuberant responding’ – loss of data
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Controlling inputControlling input Philosophical problems
– Does language production require ‘freedom of thought’?
Practical issues:– Problem:
how to characterise non-linguistic message?– Solution:
hold message constant, and manipulate ‘pathway’ of processing instead (state of processor)
– Priming paradigms (effects of prior processing)– Creating conflicts (cf. ambiguity resolution in
comprehension)
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Controlling output: Controlling output: Specified elicitationSpecified elicitation
Specified elicitation: tell participants what to say.– 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
Array description (Smith & Wheeldon, 2001) Repeating sentences (Ferreira, 1993)
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Controlling output: Controlling output: Normative elicitationNormative elicitation
Normative elicitation: use 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….’
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Manipulating pathways: Manipulating pathways: Error elicitationError elicitation
Basic idea: – set up situations which lead to errors in ‘natural’ speech
Agreement errors:– Participants repeat and complete sentence fragments:
The key to the cabinets…were heavy
– Cause of errors: Conflict between number (or gender) of head and local
noun
– Used to examine e.g. contribution of conceptual info and morphology to agreement
(Bock & Eberhard, 1993; Vigliocco, Butterworth & Semenza, 1995)
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Manipulating pathways: Manipulating pathways: primingpriming
Priming: – change probability/ease of producing particular
utterance.– Cooperating (rather than competing) plan.
Concurrent presentation:– Distractor and target presented at same time
Consecutive presentation:– Distractor presented and processed before
target
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Manipulating pathways:Manipulating pathways:Concurrent presentationConcurrent presentation
Picture-word interference:– Target stimulus:
– presented visually– must be named
– Distractor stimulus:– presented auditorily or visually– must be ignored
– Stimulus onsets may be simultaneous or staggered
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Manipulating pathways:Manipulating pathways:Concurrent presentationConcurrent presentation
Used for exploring timecourse of lexical access (Schriefers, Meyer & Levelt, 1990)
– Targets were objects such as sheep– Distractors:
Different relations to target:– Phonologically-related (sheet)– Semantically-related (goat)– Unrelated (bed)
Different presentation onsets:– 150 ms before target– Simultaneous with target– 150 ms after target
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Manipulating pathways:Manipulating pathways:Concurrent presentationConcurrent presentation
Results: – early in timecourse:
semantic distractors slow naming more than unrelated or phonological distractors;
– later in timecourse: phonological distractors speed naming more than
unrelated or semantic distractors.
Control experiment used non-production (recognition) task– Excluded comprehension-based explanation?
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Manipulating pathways:Manipulating pathways:Consecutive presentationConsecutive presentation
‘Prime’ stimulus processed – Cf concurrent presentation, where
distractor stimulus is ignored
Target then processed– How does prior processing of prime
affect processing of target?
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Manipulating pathways:Manipulating pathways:Consecutive presentationConsecutive presentation
Word-priming (Wheeldon & Monsell, 1994)
– Participants read dictionary definitions and generate response
‘A very large mammal that swims in the sea and was widely hunted’
– Then picture of related object (shark) presented
– Here, slower responses when prime is related than unrelated
– Attributed to competitive activation
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Manipulating messageManipulating message Oldest method of studying production?
– Create minimal contrasts in intended message;– study differences in realisation of message.
‘Simply describe’ (Osgood, 1971)
– Enact (or show film) of minimally distinct eventse.g., ball rolling across table vs man holding ball before ball rolls across table– Use of indefinite article a in first case vs definite article the in
second case
Very simple method – but many problems:– How do we characterise ‘minimal semantic contrast’?
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Neurophysiological Neurophysiological MeasuresMeasures
Recent technological developments allow research on neurophysiological aspects of production.– Which areas of the brain are involved?– What is the timecourse of processing?– Are different
areas/processes/timecourses associated with different aspects of production?
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Some MethodsSome Methods Event-related potentials (ERPS):
– brain responses time-locked to some "event“– sensory stimulus (visual flash or auditory sound), mental
event (recognition of a specified target stimulus), or omission of stimulus (increased time gap between stimuli).
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI):– form of magnetic resonance imaging of brain registering
blood flow to functioning areas of the brain
Positron emission tomography (PET):– uses detection of subatomic particles to identify how
different areas of brain function.
NB: other methods coming into use
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SummarySummary Language production requires assembling multiple levels
of linguistic structure accurately and fluently, in real time.
Language production in some ways harder to study than comprehension:– How to control input?
Many methods:– keep propositional content constant– create and study variations in processing mechanisms, rather
than effects of variations in message itself.– Problem remains: what is relationship between conceptual and
linguistic processing? New technologies offer new possibilities for tracing
timecourse and neurophysiological underpinnings of language production
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Assessing models of Assessing models of production production
Semantic interference effect– Objects are harder to name in presence of
semantically-related word.– Effect may be related to conceptual processing or
feedback from phonological processing. fMRI study:
– present same stimuli, and see which areas of brain activated.
– results: differential activation of various areas in semantic-interference condition relative to control condition; consistent with phonological feedback. (de Zubicaray,Wilson, McMahon & Muthiah, 2001)
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Identifying neural bases Identifying neural bases of productionof production
Grammatical gender: – central aspect of lexical representation in
many languages. fMRI study: which areas of brain
activated in gender production?– compared producing gender-marked
determiner with naming object itself.– results: pronounced activation of single
region in Broca’s area when producing determiner.
(Heim, Opitz & Friederici, 2002).