Language Production

Question 1

Outline Broca’s Aphasia

Answer 1

Damage to Broca’s area (near motor area for tongue and mouth)
Problems with producing speech, they can think words but not articulate them

Question 2

What is speaking?

Answer 2

Access concepts via semantic memory
Know rules of grammar to get speech into correct order
Access specific words that we need to put into that syntactic structure
Need to be able to say it

Question 3

What are the building blocks of language?

Answer 3

1. Semantics
2. Syntax
3. Morphology
4. Form (Phonology)
5. Speech

Question 4

What are semantics?

Answer 4

Meaning, semantic concept

Question 5

What is syntax?

Answer 5

Grammar of our language
Can change the meaning
Phrase structure: Noun Phrase + Verb Phrase
Noun Phrase –> determiner (the, a, every) + Noun
Verb Phrase –> Verb (+ NP (+ PP))

Question 6

What is Morphology?

Answer 6

Morphemes are the smallest meaningful unit of language
Cat is a single morpheme
-s is a suffix
-ed is a suffix also
-un is a prefix
fan-bleedin-tastic is an infix (emphasis)

Question 7

What is Form?

Answer 7

Orthography = graphemes (letters)
Phonology = phonemes (distinct sound units that comprise a language) /t/ /th/ /k/
2 graphemes = t + h
Single phoneme = th

Question 8

What is Speech?

Answer 8

Pragmatics are the meaning within the meaning
Language in context e.g. what’s up (not literally what is up)
Answers the question why a particular structure may be used.

Question 9

What are Grice’s Maxims?

Answer 9

Rules we must follow in order to have successful communication

1. Quantity - don’t include more information than necessary
2. Quality - communication should be truthful
3. Relation - communication should be relevant to the topic of conversation
4. Manner - speaker avoids ambiguity

Question 10

What is the mental lexicon?

Answer 10

Store of words
Different representations for different aspects of the word e.g. phonological, semantics, spelling, syntax
Spreading activation in semantic networks (unaware of this activation)

Question 11

How do we communicate?

Answer 11

Speak at 2-3 words per second
Peppered with pauses and ‘errs’ and hesitations
A delay in initiating speech may be the result of processing problems.

Question 12

Outline tip-of-the-tongue state

Answer 12

Blocking (Schacter, 1999) - interference from conflicting information results in hesitation of T-O-T-T state
Activation and competition between semantically similar information

Question 13

Outline some examples of slips of the tongue

Answer 13

Words - ‘the forks of a prong’
Morphemes - ‘slicely thinned’
Phonemes - ‘lork yibrary’
Concept - ‘spork’

Question 14

Outline and explain Levelt et al’s (1999) WEAVER++ model

Answer 14

Stands for Word-form Encoding by Activation and VERification
A computational model, focuses on the processes involved in individual spoken words
There are 3 main levels within the network:
1. At the highest level are nodes representing lexical concepts
2. At the second level are nodes representing lemmas (abstract words possessing syntactic and semantic features but not phonological ones) from the mental lexicon. Thus, if you know the meaning of a word you are about to say and that it is a noun, but you do not know its pronunciation, you have accessed its lemma.
3. At the lowest level are nodes representing word forms in terms of morphemes (basic units of meaning) and their phonemic segments.
Processing proceeds from meaning to sound
What happens is known as lexicalisation which is the process of translating a word’s meaning into its sound representation during speech production.

Question 15

Outline research supporting WEAVER++’s ideas

Answer 15

Turennout et al. (1998) found using ERPs that syntactic information about a noun’s gender was available 40ms before its initial phoneme; consistent with Levelt’s theoretical approach.

Question 16

How does evidence from speech errors support models of speech production?
(T-O-T-T state, separate stages, morpheme-exchange error implications)

Answer 16

We can see the distinction between a lemma and the word itself in the tip-of-the-tongue state. It occurs when we have a concept or idea in mind but cannot find the appropriate word. Generally occurs when semantic processing is successful but phonological processing is unsuccessful - supporting Levelt’s model of speech production.
Different kinds of speech errors meaning there are separate stages of speech production that these errors can occur in.
Morpheme-exchange errors involve inflections or suffixes remaining in place but attached to the wrong words. An implication of these errors is that the positioning of inflections is dealt with by a rather separate process from the one responsible for positioning word stems.
The word stems seem to be worked out before the inflections are added because the spoken inflections or suffixes are generally altered to fit with the new word stems e.g. the ‘s’ in the forks of a prong is pronounced in a way appropriate within the word ‘forks’, but differs from the ‘s’ sound in the original word ‘prongs’.

Question 17

What are some methods used to assess language production?

Answer 17

Freudian slip experiments

Picture naming