Three Steps of Language Production Conceptualization Deciding What To Express Formulation Determining How To Express Articulation Expressing It

Abstract
Language production is logically divided into three major steps: deciding what to
express (conceptualization), determining how to express it (formulation), and
expressing it (articulation). Although achieving goals in conversation, structuring
narratives, and modulating the ebb and flow of dialogue are inherently important to
understanding how people speak, psycholinguistic studies of language production
have primarily focused on the formulation of single, isolated utterances. An
utterance consists of one or more words, spoken together under a single
intonational contour or expressing a single idea. The simplest meaningful utterance
consists of a single word. Generating a word begins with specifying its semantic
and pragmatic properties-that is, a speaker decides upon an intention or some
content to express (e.g., a desired outcome or an observation) and encodes the
situational constraints on how the content may be expressed. The next major stage
is formulation, which in turn is divided into a word selection stage and a sound
processing stage. Sound processing, in contrast, involves constructing the
phonological form of a selected word by retrieving its individual sounds and
organizing them into stressed and unstressed syllables and then specifying the
motor programs to realize those syllables. The final process is articulation-that is,
the execution of motor programs to pronounce the sounds of a word.
Three steps of language production
Conceptualization
deciding what to express
Formulation
determining how to express
articulation
expressing it
1. Characteristics Of Spoken Language

2. 2. i It is language produced by articulate sounds, as opposed to written language. Many
languages have no written form, and so are only spoken.
3. 3. ral lanuae or vocal language
4. 4. "E language produced with the vocal tracts, as opposed to s_ign , which is produced
with the hands andface.
5. 5. IJIJ Fflilmer trerma spoken language" sometimes used to mean only vocal
languages, especially by linguists, making all three terms synonyms by excluding sign
languages.
6. 6. votrhiers. refer to language as "spoken", especially in contrast to written
transcriptions of signs.
In psycholinguistics, language production is the production of spoken or written language. It
describes all of the stages between having a concept, and translating that concept into
linguistic form. In computational linguistics/natural language processing and artificial
intelligence, the term natural language generation (NLG) is more common, and those models
may or may not be psychologically motivated.
LANGUAGE PRODUCTION As we have discussed, comprehenders must map the
spoken or written input onto entries in the mental lexicon and must generate
various levels of syntactic, semantic, and conceptual structure. In language
production, people are faced with the converse problem. They must map from
a conceptual structure to words and their elements. In this section, we first
discuss how people produce single words and then turn to the production of
longer utterances. Our discussion will concentrate on spoken language
production, which has been the focus of most of the research on language
production. We will then consider how the representations and processes
involved in writing differ from those involved in speaking. Access to single
words in spoken language production To give an overview of how speakers
generate single words, we first summarize the model of lexical access proposed
by Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999; see Roelofs, 1997, for a computational
model implementing key parts of the theory). Like most other models of word
production, this model claims that words are planned in several processing
steps. Each step generates a specific type of representation, and information is
transmitted between representations via the spreading of activation. The first
processing step, called conceptualization, is deciding what notion to express.
For instance, a speaker can say the baby, Emilio, Her Majestys grandson,
or simply he to refer to a small person in a highchair. In making such a
choice, the speaker considers a variety of things, including whether the person
has been mentioned before and whether the listener is likely know his proper
name (see Clark, 1996; Levelt, 1989, for discussions of conceptualization and
the role of social factors Treiman et al., Psycholinguistics, 30 therein). The next
step is to select a word that corresponds to the chosen concept. In the view of
Levelt et al. (1999), the speaker first selects a lemma, or syntactic word unit.
Lemmas specify the syntactic class of the word and often additional syntactic
information, such as whether a verb is intransitive (e.g., sleep) or transitive
(e.g., eat) and, if transitive, what arguments it takes. Lemma selection is a
competitive process. Several lemmas may be activated at once because
several concepts are more or less suitable to express the message, and
because lemmas that correspond to semantically similar concepts activate
each other via links to shared superordinate concepts or conceptual features. A
lemma is selected as soon as its activation level exceeds the summed
activation of all competitors. A checking mechanism ascertains that the
selected lemma indeed maps onto the intended concept. The following
processing step, morpho-phonological encoding, begins with the retrieval of the
morphemes corresponding to the selected lemma. For the lemma baby there is
only one morpheme to retrieve, but for grandson or walked two morphemes
must be retrieved. Evidence that speakers access morphological information
comes from a variety of sources. For instance, people sometimes make speech
errors such as imagine getting your model renosed, where stems exchange
while affixes remain in place (Fromkin, 1971). Other evidence shows that
morphologically related primes have different effects on the production of
target words than do semantically or phonologically related primes (e.g.,
Roelofs, 1996; Zwitserlood, Boelte, & Dohmes, 2000). Priming experiments
have also shown that morphemes are accessed in sequence, according to their
order in the utterance (e.g., Roelofs, 1996).

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Abstract

1. Characteristics Of Spoken Language

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