Cognitive Psychology, 2nd Ed.

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Cognitive Psychology, 2nd Ed.

• Chapter 11
• Language Production

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Speech Production

• 2-3 words per second with 3-12 dysfluencies per
  minute, using a vocabulary of 45,000 words.
• Errors can reveal processing units (Easier for a
  camel to go through the knee of an ideal).

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Speech Production

• Agrammatic speech found in the telegraphic
  language of Brocas aphasia reveals problems in
  grammatical encoding (dogboatuhwater).
• Neologisms and pseudogrammatic utterances found
  in Wernickes aphasia reveal lexical-semantic
  failures (Its a girl uncurl on a boat. A dog is
  another dog on a boatum).

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Sentence Generation

• Grammatical encoding refers to the selection of
  the lexical entries to be used from among those
  in the speakers vocabulary and to the assembly of
  a syntactic frame.
• Phonological encoding referes to the assembly of
  sound forms and the intonation to be executed
  during articulation.

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Lexical Representations

• A lemma is an abstract representation of the word
  that specifies its semantic and grammatical
  features (e.g., goat and sheep share semantic
  features and are both nouns but differ in
  grammatical gender).
• A lexeme is a representation of the phonological
  or sound structure of the word (goat and sheep
  are totally different at the level of sounds).

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Stages of Grammatical Encoding (She is handing
him some broccoli.)

• Functional processing selects lemmas and assigns
  each to a grammatical function or case role.
  Example error He is handing her some broccoli.
• Positional processing assigns the output to a
  phrase structure tree. Example error She was
  hand himming some broccoli.

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Phonological Encoding

• Failures of phonological encoding are common in
  the speech of young children (fis is spoken when
  fish is needed).
• Suprasegmental phonology provides the
• variations in intonation and pauses. Consider
  the difference in normal speech and the slow
  rate, high pitch, and large intonation changes of
  motherese.

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Articulation

• Phonetics is the study of how speech sounds are
  actually produced by the human vocal tract.
• Consonants involve constriction of air flow
  whereas the mouth is open with vowels allowing
  unimpeded phonation.

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Articulation of English Consonants

• Place refers to the position of air flow
  constriction in the mouth (e.g. bilabial).
• Manner refers to the way sound is emitted (e.g.,
  stops involve complete constriction at the place
  of articulation).
• Voicing refers to whether the vocal cords
  vibrate (voiced) or not. Voice onset time may
  differ (baimmediate vs. pa60 ms delay).

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Cascade vs. InteractionGrammatical and
Phonological Encoding

• By phonologically biasing the production system,
  people commit Spoonerisms (e.g., saying barn door
  instead of darn boor).
• Of interest, such errors occur three times more
  often for real words (30) than for nonwords
  (10), such as saying beal dack instead of deal
  back.
• The lexical bias effect supports a connectionist
  architecture with backward interaction.

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Writing Systems

• Ideographic writing systems date to 10,000 years
  ago in Sumeria.
• Phonetic writing first appeared 3,500 years ago
  in the Sinai desert. A small number of letters
  are used to code sounds rather than large numbers
  of ideographs.

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Writing Processes

• Planning refers to retrieving/creating ideas,
  organizing ideas, and setting goals.
• Reviewing refers to reading the text being
  produced and evaluating and editing it.
• Translating or generating refers to the
  linguistic processes to encode sentences and
  links between sentences. Motor transcription is
  closely linked in time, just as articulation is
  in speech.

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Spelling Processes

• Orthography, the mapping of sounds to written
  symbols, must be specified only in writing unless
  you spell orally.
• Dissociation in acquired dysgraphia shows damage
  to direct orthographic lexicon to grapheme path.
  J.G. could spell nonwords but failed to spell
  irregular words (none rather than known.).
  Only the phoneme to grapheme conversion path was
  intact.

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Knowledge-Transforming

• Content problems concern what to say and
  rhetorical problems concern how to say it.
  Children tell what they want to say about content
  but do not reflect on how to say it.
• Adults reflect on content and rhetorical problem
  spaces concurrently. They may transform
  knowledge as a result (i.e., changing what you
  think as a result of trying to express your
  thoughts).
• How do I know what I think until I see what I
  say. E. M. Forster

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Challenges of writing

• Recursive interaction of planning, translating,
  and reviewing.
• Heavy load on working memory.
• Necessity of maintaining multiple representations
  of the authors intent, the actual text produced,
  and the readers perspective.

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Writers Block

• Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank
  sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your
  forehead.
• Gene Fowler
• Inability to produce text caused by evaluation
  anxiety, cognitive overload, maladaptive
  planning strategies, and other process
  dysfunctions.