Language production: methods

• ‘..an intrinsically more difficult subject to study than language comprehension’

• Not susceptible to experimental study?

• Historically: observational methods

• Recently: experimental methods

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.

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)

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

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

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

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….’

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.

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

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?

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.

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...

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

Manipulating processes (3)

– Concurrent presentation: • Picture-word interference: (Schriefers, Meyer & Levelt, 1990)

BOOT

• how does distractor affect processing of stimulus?

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)

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

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).