1

Speech Production Process

Language is the most important means of communication created by human

civilization. It is a way to share ideas, opinions, thoughts, and, most importantly, knowledge.
As Sapir (1931, p.105) already stated, "Language is the communicative process par
excellence in every known society." It is illustrated mainly with two forms/versions: written
and spoken. In psycholinguistics, the latter is considered one of the most complex linguistic
behaviours processed by the human brain, as it involves many and various cognitive
operations. Still, despite its complexity, most speakers seem to easily, quickly, and
autonomously produce spoken language and simultaneously understood by the hearers
(listeners). That is, the successful speaking process involves both language comprehension
and language production. First, the speaker must be fully aware, conscious, and cognizant of
the language system shared by the speech community. That is to say, the words, their
semantic meanings (lemmas), and their different combinations and structures have to be well
acknowledged by the speaker -for him- to construct a well-formed, comprehensible linguistic
message. Second, with the speaker having the necessary linguistic knowledge, he/she can,
therefore, produce spoken language. According to Fields (2004), language production refers
to the process in which meaning is created and expressed through language. Particularly,
although the language is abstractly stored in the mind, it is concretely demonstrated in speech
and into linguistic messages. On that account, these intended messages are transmitted from
the addresser's mind to the addressee's via speech. The speech, in turn, is segmented into
separate but related units (linguistically, utterances); each utterance consists of a couple of
words that are grammatically and semantically compatible with a specific context.

Although in daily life, speech can happen very rapidly and spontaneously, its process
involves many procedures. According to Levelt (1989), the speech production is mainly
divided into four major steps:

Conceptualization:

Conceptualization or the "conceptualizer" is the first component in Levelt's

psycholinguistic model of speech production. It is the phase where speech sparks. It refers to
the process of generating and monitoring messages. In this stage, the speaker starts by
generating or initiating intention and thus formulate it and encode it into a coherent
conceptual/pre-verbal plan that consists of several chunks in the mind. Besides, this
component also monitors what is about to be said and how it is going to be said; the speaker
mentally puts forward a plan that guides his/her speech. In order for the message to be well
generated/created, the speaker needs declarative knowledge (DK), including the person's
 2

general experience of the world (encyclopaedic knowledge), knowledge about the current
situation, and knowledge about the discourse record (what has already been said).

Formulation:

"Formulator' is the next component in Levelt's model. After the conceptual plan was
already prepared and organized, the speaker's mind can easily and instantly start picking out
the lexicons that correspond to and are needed in a specific context. In other words, message
formulation is the process by which the speaker transforms a mental concept into linguistic
items (structures) in the mind (scattered lexicons). Therefore, in this step, grammatical and
phonological encoding takes place; both involve lexical access procedures and syntactic
procedures. Each chunk of the conceptual plan triggers/activates a set of lemmas (semantic
information of words); however, only the lemmas that receive the highest activation will
match the concepts in the pre-verbal plan. To exemplify, if a person wants to say, "the
woman met the man in the village," only four content words ‘woman', 'meet', 'man', 'village'
will receive the highest activation out of 30,000 average of active words in the mind. After
the lemma is retrieved, its syntactic properties become available, and thus, it will be easier for
the speaker to form syntactic structures in the mind, including syntactic category,
grammatical function… In this level, all that the speaker has is a thin string of lemmas that
are semantically and syntactically organized into phrases in the mind; however, the complete
forms are yet to be specified.

Articulation:

The next component in this model is the "articulator," which is responsible for the
motor execution of the phonetic plan (it involves speech organs). This phonetic plan will be
formed into a buffered speech (internal speech) that will instantly trigger the motor
commands which will finally cause articulation of the message, that is, executing the motor
movements necessary to properly produce the sounds structure of the phrase and its
constituent words.

Self-monitoring:

This step exclusively refers to error correction and self-repairs. Speech can be
interrupted by hesitation, stops, repetitions, all because speakers tend to spontaneously
correct themselves once they make a mistake. self-repairs starts when speakers detect an error
and intend to correct it; they may utter some editing expression, such as uh, I mean, sorry, err,
and then finally repair/correct the utterance by saying a potentially more correct version of
the previously uttered phrase/sentence.
 3

References:

- Aseel Kazum Mahmoud (2014): Psycholinguistics: The Production of Language.

- Wikipedia.org
- Researchgate.net