Colloquium - Linda Wheeldon (U. of Birmingham)- "Producing Spoken Sentences: The Scope of Incremental Planning"

*Please note special time and place for this colloquium.

The production of spoken sentences involves the generation of a number of levels of representation; a conceptual representation for the message we wish to convey, a grammatical representation that determines an appropriate word order for that message, and phonological and phonetic representations that guide articulation. In normal speech, these representations can be generated and articulated at an average rate of three words per second. To account for such processing speed, models of sentence production propose that speech is planned incrementally, so that the articulation of early parts of an utterance occurs in parallel with the planning of upcoming segments. However, exactly how processing at different levels is co-ordinated remains a matter of dispute. In particular, there is disagreement about how much of an utterance must be generated at a particular level of representation before processing at the next level can begin. The focus of this talk is on the timing of early conceptual and grammatical encoding processes. A series of experiments will be presented which use reaction-time and eye-tracking methodologies to investigate the scope of processing during spoken sentence production. The relationship between conceptual and grammatical processes will be investigated by comparing planning in a head-initial language (English) to planning in a head-final language (Japanese).