Cours 04

Speech production• What happens when we speak?• One idea: a spreading activation model (Dell 1986)Speech production• How could this model be tested?– Test predictions regarding time course of production– Look at ways the model can fail and compare to humans• add noise = speech errors• damage network = patients with impairmentsSpeech errors: why?• Looking at how the model goes wrong can tell us how it is put together – What are the units of speech production? – How are units interconnected? – What is the domain of speech planning? Speech errors: how?• Problem: speech errors are very rare; we can’t easily observe them in the lab • Two solutions: – Collect overheard errors over a long time • problem: perceptual bias: are you equally likely to notice all kinds of errors? – Increase chances of making an error in an experimental situation • rapid pronunciation of difficult sequences (cf. “tongue twisters”) • Example: repeat quickly hes nev pem gek (Goldrick & Larson 2008) Types of speech error• Errors are not random; only some possible error types occurSome tendencies• Similar units tend to interact:– phonemes with other phonemes, words with other words– phonemes in same syllable position – words of same grammatical category • Errors tend to respect the rules of the language – proue tordue troue pordue more likely than– clou tordu tlou corduPhoneme similarity effect• Similarity effect extends to phonetic properties of phonemes – ...