Formulation

This is the second stage of speech production, when the messages are framed into words, phrases, and
clauses by the speaker. Essentially, this process involves translating the conceptual representation into a
linguistic form. Additionally, this stage includes the process of lexicalization; where the words that the
speaker intends to say are selected, includes the process of syntax planning; where words are combined
to make a sentence, involves detailed phonetic and articulatory planning, and includes the process of
phonological encoding; where words are turned into sounds. In short, this process involves; grammatical
encoding, morphological encoding, and phonetic encoding.

In the next component in the production system, the formulator, the propositionally organized
preverbal plan activates the items in the lexicon that best correspond to the different chunks of the
intended message that will, in turn, be responsible for transforming it into a linguistic structure. In
Levelt’s model, as well as in several other models (e.g. Garrett, 1975, 2000; Kempen & Huijbers, 1983),
grammatical and phonological encoding are lexically driven. For grammatical encoding to take place,
both lexical access procedures and syntactic procedures are applied. In the lexicon, each lexical item is
specified for semantic and syntactic information (lemmas), and morphological and phonological
information (lexemes). From a number of connectionist proposals as to how lexical access takes place
(Anderson, 1983; Dell 1986; MacKay, 1987; Rumelhart et al., 1986), Levelt presents Dell’s (1986)
spreading activation theory as the most promising one to account for how lexical access takes place
during real time performance. In brief, a chunk in the preverbal plan activates a number of lemmas in
the lexicon. The lemmas which receive the highest activation because their semantic specifications
match the concepts in the preverbal plan will be selected5. For example, if a speaker wants to produce
the sentence ‘The man gave the woman the money”, out of 30,000 words average speakers have active
in their lexicon the four content words ‘man’, ‘give’, ‘woman’ and ‘money’ will receive the highest
activation because they best match the pre-verbal plan. This does not mean that other items do not get
activated. Together with ‘man’, other entries which share similar conceptual specifications get activated,
but it is ‘man’ that gets the highest activation6 (See Figure 2 below).

Formulation:

 Grammatical Encoding
 Morphological encoding
 Phonetic Encoding

Speech errors

“Speech errors allow us to peek in on the production process because we know what the speaker
intended to say, but the unintentional mstake freezes the production process momentarily and catches
the linguistic mechanism in one instance of production” (scovel, 2009, p.32)

 Speech errors are made by speakers unintentionally.

 They are very common and occur in everyday speaking.
 In formulation speech, we are often influenced by the sound system of language. For example,
big and fat--- pig fat; fill the pool---fool the pill.

slips of the tongue or tongue-slips

The scientific study of speech errors, commonly called slips of the tongue or tongue-slips, can
provide useful clues to the processes of language production: they can tell us where a speaker
stops to think.

Spoonerism
Spoonerism is an error in speech or deliberate play on words in which corresponding
consonants, vowel or morphemes are switched between two words in a phrase.

e.x:
 “The Lord is shoving leopard” instead of “The Lord is a loving shepherd”
 “we’ll have have the hags flung out” “we’ll have the flags hang out”
 “is the bean dizzy?” “is the Dean busy?

EXAMPLES OF THE EIGHT TYPES OF ERRORS

(1) Shifts, one speech segment disappears from its appropriate place and appears somewhere else.
: That’s so she’ll be ready incase she dicide to hits it. (decides to hit it).
(2) Exchanges are, in fact, double shifts, in which two linguistic units exchange places.
: Fancy getting your model resnosed. (getting your nose remodeled).
(3) Anticipations occur when a later segment takes the place of an earlier one. They are different
from shifts in that the segment that intrudes on another also remains in its correct place and
thus is used twice.
: Bake my bike. (take my bike).
(4) Perseverations appear when a earlier segment replaces a later item.
: He pulled a pantrum. (tantrum).
(5) Additions add linguistic material.
: I didn’t explain this clarefully enough. (carefully enough).
(6) Deletions leave something out.
: I’ll just get up and mutter intelligibly. (unintelligibly).
(7) Substitutions occur when one segment is replaced by an intruder. These are different from the
previously described slips in that the source of the intrusion may not be in the sentence.
: At low speeds it’s too light. (heavy).
(8) Blends apparently occur when more than one word is being considered and the two intended
items “fuse” or blend into a single item.
: That child is looking to be spaddled. (spanked\paddled).