Abstract
PurposeCurrent approaches to speech production aim to explain adult behavior and so make assumptions that, when taken to their logical conclusion, fail to adequately account for development. This failure is problematic if adult behavior can be understood to emerge from the developmental process. This problem motivates the proposal of a developmentally sensitive theory of speech production. The working hypothesis, which structures the theory, is that feedforward representations and processes mature earlier than central feedback control processes in speech production.MethodTheoretical assumptions that underpin the 2 major approaches to adult speech production are reviewed. Strengths and weaknesses are evaluated with respect to developmental patterns. A developmental approach is then pursued. The strengths of existing theories are borrowed, and the ideas are resynthesized under the working hypothesis. The speech production process is then reimagined in developmental stages, with each stage building on the previous one.ConclusionThe resulting theory proposes that speech production relies on conceptually linked representations that are information-reduced holistic perceptual and motoric forms, constituting the phonological aspect of a system that is acquired with the lexicon. These forms are referred to as exemplars and schemas, respectively. When a particular exemplar and schema are activated with the selection of a particular lexical concept, their forms are used to define unique trajectories through an endogenous perceptual–motor space that guides implementation. This space is not linguistic, reflecting its origin in the prespeech period. Central feedback control over production emerges with failures in communication and the development of a self-concept.
Highlights
A Developmental Approach to Speech ProductionThe developmentally sensitive theory of speech production outlined extends the basic idea, first outlined in Redford (2015), that adult speech production processes and representations are structured by the acquisition of spoken language
Current approaches to speech production aim to explain adult behavior and so make assumptions that, when taken to their logical conclusion, fail to adequately account for development
Given the protracted development of speech motor control, why can we more or less understand what children are saying when they first begin to use words at about 12 months of age? even more strikingly, how is it possible that 3-year-old children seem to never stop talking when their speech motor skills are still so immature? The answer put forward in this review article is that feedforward processes mature earlier than central feedback control processes
Summary
The developmentally sensitive theory of speech production outlined extends the basic idea, first outlined in Redford (2015), that adult speech production processes and representations are structured by the acquisition of spoken language. The production of first words is possible This heralds the onset of speech production, which is imagined here as the moment when the infant, motivated to communicate a specific referential meaning, uses her perceptual– motor map to translate an exogenously derived perceptual exemplar into vocal action. Updates to both the perceptual–motor map and schema representations follow from this shift, soon resulting in adultlike representations This proposed final stage in the development of speech production is consistent with the evidence that socio-indexical information, such as gender-specific use of phonetic features, begin to emerge in children’s speech around the age of 4 years This observation brings us back to an earlier one that closes the gap between work in speech motor control and real-world speaker behavior, that is, the observation that participants’ behavior in auditory feedback perturbation experiments resembles phonetic convergence, normally understood as a socially driven behavior meant to lubricate interactions between interlocutors
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