Language Production

ETI209 Psychology and Language

Asst. Prof. Xheni Simaku

Metin Göktuğ Filiz

Linguists agree that there are four basic language skills:

1. Listening

2. Speaking

3. Reading

4. Writing

5. Grammar

6. Vocabulary
 In psycholinguistics, language production
refers to speaking and writing. When we
speak or write even a few words, we
generate new language, thus known as
production. This is opposed to language
comprehension in psycholinguistics, which
means understanding language conveyed
to you bu listening to speech or reading
written text.
Although a common caricature of speaking is
that it is the reverse of listening, language
production processes fundamentally differ
from comprehension processes in many
respects. Whereas people typically recognize
the words in their native language quickly and
automatically, the same words require an
intention to speak and can take over five times
longer to generate than to recognize.
 In linguistics, 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.
 The Speech Communication Chain
When we use language, we use it to communicate an idea
from our minds to the minds of someone else.
The key elements in any
communication system are :

 An information source
 A transmitter
 A signal
 A receiver
 A destination
 Levelt’s model of speech production

One of the most influencial parallel models (1989)

Three major levels are involved in speech production.

 Conceptualization
 Formulation:
- Grammatical encoding (selection of syntactic frame and
lexical items)
- Phonological encoding (specification of phonetic form)
 Articulation
During conceptualization, we develop an intention and select relevant
information from the internal (memory) or external (stimuli) environment to
create an utterance.

Formulation is divided into lexicalization and syntactic planning. In

lexicalization, we select the relevant word-forms and in syntactic planning we
put these together into a sentence. In talking about word-forms, we need to
consider the idea of lemmas. This is the basic abstract conceptual form which is
the basis for other derivations.

For example, break can be considered a lemma, which is the basis for other
forms such as break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking.

The third level is the process of articulation, which involves two steps
corresponding to grammatical encoding and phonological encoding.
Putting these basic elements together, Meyer (2000) introduced the « Standard
Model of Word-form Encoding » as a summation of Levelt’s model.

The model is illustrating five level of summation of conceptualization, lemma,

morphemes, phonemes, and phonetic levels, using the example word « tiger ».
From top to bottom, the levels are:

• Semantic level: the conceptualization of «tiger» with an image of a tiger.

• Lemma level: select the lemma of the word «tiger».

• Morpheme level: morphological encoding of the word tiger, t, i ,g , e, r.

• Phoneme level: phonological encoding of each morpheme in the word «tiger».

• Phonetic level: syllabification of the phonemes in the Word «tiger».

Which one took longer to say?
We access frequent, familiar words more quickly than less frequent,
unfamiliar words. Basket is about seven times more common than
syringe, so we are usually faster to name a picture of a basket than a
picture of a syringe.

Surprisingly, the length of a word does not have a large effect on how
long it takes to begin saying it. Once word frequency is controlled for,
it takes about the same amount of time to begin to say caterpillar as it
does to begin to say cat. Caterpillar will take longer to physically
pronounce, but all of the stages of speech production up to articulation
take about the same amount of time regardless of word length.
 Thank you for your time!