today's lecture is going to be about speech production I want to start with an example all right
look at that picture
what do you call the tubular viewing toy that produces symmetrical designs through an arrangement of
colored chips and mirrors like the one you see on the screen you might kind of have a feeling you
know that worked as a very low frequency word you just can't really grasp it
so we asking today is how it happens during this process in which you try to retrieve that word from
which you can't really do it right this process we're going to look at today in the process of
language understanding we dealt with over the last two weeks you initiate interpretations on the
basis of the smallest Snippets of speech beginning to activate possible lexical items and
immediately trying to integrate these with the structure of the unfolding sent as information comes
in you wrap it
integrated and you narrow down possible interpretation like you remember this kind of analogy right
things come in and as it goes you try and interpret the utterance
and the garden pop effect that we discussed last week you know makes this incremental nature of
comprehension very apparent in production such an incremental process cannot work
we should pause here for a second and think about why it is
right you thought about it well you know you can't start a sentence incrementally without knowing
where to go you need to have an idea of the conceptual nature of that sentence what do you want to
express we also want to have a good understanding of the syntactic construction you're producing
right so the incremental nature of comprehension might not be exactly the same conceptual framework
for language production there are we assume Communications
we smooth like a well-oiled machine today you know I actually want you to get an intuition about
what real verbal communication looks like and I will provide you in class I would have provided you
with a transcript and you had a look at it and what we're learning is that you know speakers are
actually negotiating in a conversation they taking turns and they confirm prepositions of each other
by giving back channels like me
yeah or indicating that they don't understand something huh yeah to indicate to the other speaker
that you know maybe things are clear or need to be more clarified and this leads to apparently
disfluencies but they are all functions that increase the smoothness of of a conversation so let's
have a brief look at turn take turn refers to a person's speaking term so when we have a
conversation conversation I
something that you say something and I say something and these units of are saying something these
are turns now turn-taking as a fundamental skill and spoken interaction it's it's dealing with
patterns of how and when people speak with each other the basic idea is that one person speaks at a
time there's rarely set silence and people rarely talk over each other in a collaborative
conversation very important aspect of human communication for sure and and maybe even
culture in general but it is not specific to humans either you know tightly organized vocal
turn-taking is something that lots of animals do actually mostly well research in Burton other
primates and here's a nonhuman example from an Australian bird called P butcher bird and I want to
show you a video and would like you to focus on timing and turn-taking in this video
right side is it tight into locking up their son contributions obviously there are many differences
between Songbird and human communication but this is just a reminder that these kind of aspects of
human communication are not human specific at all they're more likely General properties of
coordinated behavior in organisms okay now listen to this clip I'm paying and pay close attention to
how speakers coordinate each other you won't understand the word because I assume so
you're not speaking casually Berber that is the language I have here and it's a language I worked on
during my PhD but nevertheless you can probably tell roughly what this context is what in this
context is really happening so listen to the snippet
they need to do that I mean this is a strategy guide dog dance
okay the place for a second and think about what this interaction might be about
now
this interaction is an example of a call collaborative task in which you have an instruction Giver
that gives instruction to the other person and the other person is trying to set these instructions
emotions concretely they try to find a way through a map together and you can see that we are
instruction Giver gives instruction and instruction receivers like giving feedback on these
instructions like my back channels like mmm and as repeating some part of the instruction to clarify
some uncertainties
now if you look at the temporal nature of these turn-taking I just in with the pink rectangle as
here I have indicated the pauses between turns like when actually no one was speaking if you look at
that there first of all barely any and if so they are very short so I want you to pause here for a
second and think about what does that mean for speakers and their speech production process right so
basically as soon as the other person has stopped their turn have they have
calculated a let's say proposition you immediately without a break immediately start talking
the seemingly friction is coordination of speakers as rather culture independent but it is actually
a quite a amazing feat right we immediately start talking just having you know acoustically received
the message of the average the Avatar so let's just real briefly look at whether this is turn this
turn-taking is culture-specific what do you see here is the distribution of turn-taking
gaps between speakers across 10 the typologically different languages on the x axis you see that
time of gap between turns so negative numbers mean people people's turn overlap so they talk over
each other when the values are positive that means there is a pause between turns so they underlap
and 0 corresponds to a situation which speakers speaker to immediately without any Gap starts
talking after speaker 1:and adapter so speaker once turn ends is
is at the same time as speaker to turn turn start the y axis here is just frequency of observations
so when I look at a data set of many conversations and I measured the overlap and or underlap of
each turn I get a number out for for each of my observations get many different values and if I plot
them all these values according to how often they occur excuse me I can generate a density plot like
these ones you so a peak in this density here
Nick hates the most frequent values and the lows indicate the least frequent observations
so what can we observe here well these these distributions you seem to be rather symmetric and it
seemed to be centered somewhere around zero to 200 milliseconds that means most frequently we
observe a gap between turns that is 0 to 200 milliseconds long that is not very long and this seems
to be true across cultures they're more or less all the same
it's basically corresponding to no Gap whatsoever so people start talking immediately after the
interlocutor has finished their turn this is incredible because you have to imagine perceiving and
comprehending the interlocutor is also taking up cognitive resources and time and most importantly
we also need to plan what we are going to say plan our message the lexical content we want to use
and how we syntactically combine these things not to forget the complex planning of
in a way that listeners can actually decipher all message
but communication is a well-oiled machine that this all this this this this Machinery happens in the
background and allows us to tightly interlocked our Turks what needs to happen when we plan a term
well we need to plan the conceptual part of the alterans right what is it what we want to say for
example you want to want to communicate an event in which two parties are involved the pink triangle
is acting on the yellow star the triangle star and the action between them have served
features semantic features that are relevant for communicating this event
after that a syntactic structure needs to be chosen I can say all kinds of things to express the
same scenario here right the triangle are owed the star the star was are owed by the triangle
describing the same see you see now if I have that if I have chosen a syntactic structure I need to
select appropriate lexical materials for all relevant components of this message including their
grammatical and their phonological for when I select say the Norwegian
word for Star which is stand-in for example I need to know for example what this that is word is
masculine has a masculine gender so it is instead not at stem right and I also need to know the
sequence of particular phonemes for these words as well as their metrical properties like how are
the celebified what about word stress what about lexical tone cetera when this all happened right
when it's all in place I still need to add
T collate these units in a coherent pattern so that X could content and therefore logical forms need
to be translated into an articulatory plan
remember this is not a trivial at all it took relating a single word like Star recruits many
different articulate errs who are which are coordinated tightly with each other in fractions of
seconds right
and while all of this is covered in our textbook and I highly encourage you to read this chapter
carefully Wing if you're interested in the exam and succeeding in it but we are going to focus only
here on a small subset here and that is the lexical part of this process
when way how we can learn about the mental Machinery involved in speech production is to look at
look at case and which speech production actually does not go as intent speech errors here two
examples a laboratory in our own computer intended was a computer in our own laboratory right so the
two words are exchanged the tree fell from the Apple
instead of the Apple fell from the tree so again an exchange of words so I want you to pause here
and think about what you can infer from these two cases
now the intruding words must have come to mind well before the point in the sentence where they were
supposed to be spoken right at the point of where I wanted to actually produce computer I inserted
laboratory which actually comes much later and that provides already evidence that Edwards and not
just concept a plant way in advance right we plan larger chunks of speech in advance and
something didn't work out so we unfortunately slotted the wrong words into the mm tactic slots
he's another family of speech errors which are phonological errors so have a look at them she loves
the purlins potato chips instead up she loves the solent potato chips right so the peed bilabial
stop from potato has been anticipated and word before it is another example from a logical exchange
Portland supper instead of salt and pepper so we exchanged the word onset of these two words
I want you to pause here and again think about what you might learn from these particular instances
imagine these are representative of the most common speech production errors and what do you think
can we pretentiously learn from them
now I want to move on and talk about the interest intricacy of actual lexical retrieval with a with
an anecdote so when I was doing my bachelor's I can uh I went to do an internship over the summer in
a neurological Department in our Germany and this department was particularly well known
internationally for the Aphasia special clinic so they had a lot of aphasia patients there
Dasia isn't it is an acquired language disability it's usually caused by for example Strokes certain
parts of the brain are damaged and in this scenario parts of the brain might be permanently damaged
at have actually an involvement in language comprehension and production that leads to very specific
disabilities some patients with Aphasia just are producing speech Just
fine but just can't comprehend them well hours are you know you wouldn't even notice that they have
a disability they reach comprehension is absolutely fine but they can't really produce a straight
sentence and then there is something very specific that is a very specific a phasor for lexical
retrieval is very specific if you talk to a person you wouldn't really notice that there are any
issues and comprehension or in production but there's a pockets
the Lexicon that they can't access now I was there as an intern and I took part in some of the
therapies there and that was one patient middle-aged man very friendly man had this kind of a facial
okay now
the researcher that I you know kind of joined in and one of these therapy sessions try to create our
like to repair some of these lexical retrieval issues and they had a particular method here that was
a lexical retrieval tasks and had dozens of pictures and they ask the patient to name this picture
showed up let's say a lamp and then they put patients should name it if they couldn't name it
they would researcher would give them some hints they would give them a sentence frame and which
they gave them the article including graticule gender of the word German also use grammatical gender
to kind of cue them into the word they gave them the beginning of the word the first two sounds too
kind of phonologically lead them towards the right word and if that didn't work then they actually
told him okay this is a lamp Okay so this whole process started you know the research
sharp picture and the patient named it and it was actually perfect like every picture didn't take
long immediately and named the picture occasionally the researcher needed to give them a queue and
but that immediately did the drink okay until until the last picture the last picture was a little
stool so I kind of nothing you sit on actually it's more like a little thing you put your feet on
in German it is called pakka
but is also a very infrequent old-fashioned word for it it's called Chez me which is not really
often used so the picture comes up and the patient looks at it and immediately says shame it right
the less frequent work so the researchers said yeah well that that is indeed true this is the right
word for this picture but there is more frequent more common word for that patient couldn't really
retrieve it so the researcher gave them the cues
this is a and then this is a hall gave him even the first syllable nothing worked so at the end the
researcher needs to give the patient to actually wear this it's a Haka and the patient was
immediately you know surprise themselves like a hawk of course you know of course it's all over I
know that were so the whole process started all over again from the beginning and again you know
picture shown the the patient no problem naming the pictures went through all of them quickly
ended up with the last picture again with the hooker on it the the stool he looks at it confidently
says Shaymin okay and that was the moment I was sitting there I was just supposed to watch that was
the first moment where a little tiny little laughter kind of bubbled up in me and I started smoking
because it was kind of funny how confident he said the wrong word even though he was just told to
write one totally inappropriate of course and I was ashamed of myself but it was funny so yep
he said shame again and the researcher told him again yeah that's that is the right word but his
number one we just talked about it and cute gave him the cues again to that particular word but he
couldn't retrieve the research and needed to give them now third round same thing he named every
every image well and then he finally hit that wall seeing the stool and again confidently say she me
as if this conversation was never been had about this not being the right
work and the next one same thing everything perfect the stool picture came up and he looks at it
hesitates just a couple of milliseconds like a couple of 500 milliseconds or something like that and
boom says shame again so the researcher again goes for whole process explain to him that there is
another word and it's her car and and when he hears hockey again it's super super negatively
surprised that he couldn't come up with it but like I said yeah of course hakka hakka
right and I'm not in tears but I'm already like overtly entertained by the situation and might have
already laughed out loud and you know researcher and enter the patient already they saw the funny
aspect of the situation to a little bit at least so they smiled with me wasn't totally inappropriate
but I should have now you know four times the charm the fifth time maybe does it so we went through
the process again
patient already knew all pictures he named them quickly and then we hit the final picture the stool
the patient had some kind of matter awareness now that this is really the trick here this is the
kind of bottleneck so he looked at the picture critically looked at the researcher it me picture me
researcher the picture
and then said with a question intonation Shimmer and I was really when I almost literally fell off
the stool my chair
it was so funny and we all three of us laughed about it it was just such a quirky little situation
in which the speaker the patient he knew everything about this object except it's phonological form
he couldn't retrieve that form in production and comprehension no problem and you could even repeat
it when you heard it right when the research told him it's a Hawkeyes like Haka of course but when
he had to retrieve it himself it was no way to get there
so it seems like there are different steps to lexical retrieval that I separate from each other
right
now in the class I showed you a tip of the tongue demonstration that is linked in our textbook so
please check out the textbook now and I find the link to a tip of the tongue video up there I
couldn't embedded in that in those slides but there you can see something interesting happening when
people have to kind of retrieve very unfrequent items so they really didn't know stuff about it but
they can't really retrieve the phonological form of it right and this phenomenon is called tip of
the toe
in states of State of Mind experienced by speakers when they have partially retrieved the word so
what we call Lemma and perhaps some of its own structure sometimes they can tell you how many
syllables that has but they can't really tell you you pronounce it actually they don't haven't
really retrieved the full phonological form
and this phenomenon among many others let the first researchers to scrutinize speech errors they let
them let them to conclude that speakers work their way through a sequential sequentially ordered set
of steps in which they access one specific layer of information at a time and here's one way to look
at it and many different models aren't
it doesn't really matter at the details but according to some of the models language production
occurs in successive stages first the conceptual content of the sentence is determined at the level
of message planning that is the green area second syntactic structures are decided upon and dilemmas
are selected and then assigned two slots in these syntactic phrase llamas are an abstract mental
representation of a word containing information about its meaning and syntactic category and
grammatical properties such as grammatical
but not about it sounds so and third then lexical forms are retrieves frames for complex words are
built and the correct sounds from words and some are assigned to the word frames including medical
information which syllable is strong which one is so weak lexical tone information and how sounds
are put together into syllable this results in fully specified sound representation which then is
the input for the motor planning of articulation
what happens Downstream
now the division between a llama retrieval and the lexical for mushrooms motivated by finding such
as the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon speakers have access to the concept and grammatical properties
of a word but they simply cannot access the phonological fool right and you can think of that like
like sketching a face experienced artists they first draw a rough geometric perform corresponding to
the Hat as well as the orientation of the head Etc and this correspond to our dilemma selection we
roughly know the word including its conceptual grammatical properties but not definite logical form
then the artist adds fundamental visual elements including cheekbones forehead chin years and
they're all in the correct position already similarly doing electrical form retrieval we retrieved
from logical form including its phonemes and how they're put together including into syllables and
how these syllables are magically produced with word stress Etc finally you know and sketch example
the artist draws all the details and creates what we perceive as a
human face similarly again speakers retrieve the articulate articulatory plan of those lexical forms
and actually put their articulatory organs in motion to produce them and that creates the acoustic
form that we perceive as comprehend has
okay so what do we learn today short session we took a tiny Glimpse at speech production as well as
coordinating speech with each other speech communication is apparently a well-oiled machine that is
tightly interlocked with comprehension as can be seen by turn take speakers immediately respond to
that interlocutor without any delay which requires speech planning during speech comprehension right
and we learned that speech Productions which planning and Tails and Tails several different steps
planning some tactical planning lexical selection and articulation
lexical selection itself seems to be separate into different processing steps to we seem to access
lemmas first that is an abstract representation of a word that contains semantics and grammatical
features but no phonological details now after that we access for logical information that these are
separated that these two steps Slammer selection and phonological form selection are separated can
be inferred from among other things that tip of the tongue
phenomena and this is just the tip of the iceberg there are many interesting aspects of speech
production that suggests an intricate pipeline of information retrieval all happening in fractions
of seconds while at the same time we are comprehending each other speech this is really an
incredible cognitive architecture very efficient and really were doing research on if you want to
know more about the entire pipeline of how we plan messages are we create syntactic frames and how
we
how we retrieve lexical forms and I highly recommend you read the chapter on speech production and
our textbook in detail thank you very much for your attention see you next time