Language Production Grammatical Encoding

The processes of language production can be divided into those that create the skeleton of an utterance and those that flesh the skeleton out. In this chapter we are concerned chiefly with the former, a set of processes which we term GRAMMATICAL ENCODING (Levelt, 1989). Grammatical encoding comprises both the selection of appropriate lexical concepts (entries in the speaker's vocabulary) and the assembly of a syntactic framework. It contrasts with PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING, which comprises the assembly of sound forms and the generation of intonation. The product of these processes is not speech itself, but a specification of an utterance that is adequate for controlling the processes of articulation or speech production. The components of grammatical encoding are no more accessible to conscious experience than the corresponding components of comprehension. Just as in comprehension, we typically become aware only of disruptions. But unlike disruptions of comprehension, many disruptions of production are public events: A speaker who intends to say meals on wheels and instead says wheels on meals usually knows that something has gone wrong, as does anyone within earshot. Because of their ready availability, speech errors are a rich source of clues to how language production works (Cutler, 1988). Deciphering these clues has been the focus of several pioneering studies (Dell & Reich, 1981; Fromkin, 1971; Garrett, 1975; Meringer & Meyer, 1895/ 1978). The details of the analyses diverge in important ways (some of which we touch on later), but there is reasonable agreement on the broad outline of production processes that is sketched in Figure 1. This outline roughly follows proposals by Garrett (1980, 1982, 1988) and, although it is motivated primarily by analyses of speech errors, it is intended to provide an account of normal production. The bridge from errors to normal production is built largely on the existence of strong constraints on the forms of speech errors, which are taken to point to relatively immutable components of the production process.