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Language production: methods

Language production: methods. ‘..an intrinsically more difficult subject to study than language comprehension’ Not susceptible to experimental study? Historically: observational methods Recently: experimental methods. Observational methods. Analyses of spontaneous speech:

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Language production: methods

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  1. Language production: methods • ‘..an intrinsically more difficult subject to study than language comprehension’ • Not susceptible to experimental study? • Historically: observational methods • Recently: experimental methods

  2. Observational methods • Analyses of spontaneous speech: • Researchers’ own corpora (e.g., Stemberger, 1985) • Publicly available corpora: • Non-experimental (London –Lund - Svartvik & Quirk, 1980; Wall Street Journal; CHILDES – MacWhinney & Snow, 1990) • Experimental (Map Task Corpus – Thompson et al., 1993). • Controlled experimental tasks: • Berman & Slobin, 1994.

  3. Observation: focus of study • Distributionalanalyses • Fluent speech: • Distribution of extraposed structures (Arnold, Wasow,Losongco & Ginstrom, 2000) • Distribution of thuh vs thee (Clark & Fox-Tree, 1997) • Distribution of reduced phonological forms (Bard et al., 2000) • Disfluent speech: • Scope of utterance planning (Ford & Holmes, 1978; Beattie, 1983) • Error detection and correction (Levelt, 1983)

  4. Focus of observational study (2) • Speech errors • Pattern of errors (Stemberger, 1985) • e.g. She saw him yesterday -> He saw her yesterday • Relative frequency of errors • Problems: • Paucity of data • phonological errors: 4> / 10,000 words • Bias/inaccuracies in corpus transcription: • Transcriber bias/inaccuracy (Ferber, 1991) • Distributional characteristics of language • Categorisation problems • put the floor on the bags - floor/bags vs the floor/the bags

  5. Experimental approaches • Not prey to same problems as observational studies… • Different problems instead! • Ecological validity • experimental control vs free thought/expression • Controlling responses: • Response specification - artificiality • ‘Exuberant responding’ – loss of data

  6. Specified elicitation • Usually used when semantic/syntactic structure not of interest: • Responses specified in advance for given stimulus • Picture naming • Implicit priming (Roelofs & Meyer, 1998) • DOG > BONE • SAIL > BOAT • SAIL > WIND • Array description (Smith & Wheeldon, 2001) • The fish and the star move apart • The fish moves up and the star moves down

  7. Normative elicitation • Stimuli designed to inducedesired response: • Pictures of events/objects • Descriptions of objects • ‘A very large mammal that swims in the sea and was widely hunted’ • Questions/fragments • ‘The junior surgeon handed the senior surgeon….’

  8. Potential problems • Separating conceptual and linguistic influences: • manipulations may influence non-linguistic processing. • Separating production and comprehension processes: • linguistic stimulus involves comprehension processes. • Non-representative results: • Production of specified responses may involve different processes from normal production. • Normative elicitation may have power problem: too many discarded responses.

  9. Manipulating messages • ‘Simply describe’ (Osgood, 1971): • Event description: • Ball rolling along table • A/The ball is rolling along the table • Picture description: * o o * The star is above the circle The circle is above the star

  10. Manipulating messages (2) • Picture description with context: • Cued appearance of entity (Forrest 1993) • Preceding linguistic context (Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000) • There was this old red scooter standing in a playground near a swing, with rusty wheels and scratched paint. What happened?

  11. Manipulating messages (3) • ‘Simply remember’ (Bock & Irwin, 1980) • The psychologist treated a neurotic poodle. • What happened to the neurotic poodle? > The neurotic poodle was treated by a psychologist.

  12. Manipulating processes • Basic idea: manipulate production processes. • Inhibit or facilitate particular processes • Speech errors: • SLIP paradigm (Baars, Mackay & Motley, 1975): • bash door • bean deck • darn bore > barn door • similar patterns to spontaneous speech • tongue-twisters, related-picture naming • agreement errors: (Bock & Miller, 1991) • The key to the cupboards...

  13. Manipulating processes (2) • Normal speech: interference/priming effects: • facilitate/inhibit through prior/concurrent presentation of related stimuli. • Prior presentation: • syntactic priming (Bock, 1986a) • The rock star sold some cocaine to the undercover agent > The girl is handing a brush to the man • lexical priming (Bock, 1986b) • SEARCH > The church is being struck by lightning

  14. Manipulating processes (3) • Concurrent presentation: • Picture-word interference: (Schriefers, Meyer & Levelt, 1990) BOOT • how does distractor affect processing of stimulus?

  15. Other insights into production • Eye-tracking: • monitor eye-movements before/during speech to examine timecourse of utterance preparation, relationship between attention and speech etc. • Griffin & Bock (2000)

  16. Other insights into production (2) • Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanning: • which areas of brain associated with different aspects of processing? • Verb generation: semantically-driven lexical search (Petersen et al 1988) • CAKE > eat, bake, slice…. • BUT: additional cognitive components? • Sequencing - TRUMPET > blow, make music, put away

  17. Other insights into production (3) • Event Related Potentials: • what is timecourse of processing? timelocked components: • comprehension: N400 semantic anomaly effect: He drank his coffee with milk and dog • problem: • contamination from articulatory muscles. • solution? Go-nogo method (Hagoort & van Turrenout, 1997).

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