Speakers Plan Research Articles

대통령 취임사의 문법적 특징 연구

Objectives The purpose of this paper is to examine how representative grammatical categories (mood, modality and vocative) are selected and used in presidential inaugural addresses. Through this, the purpose is to show that these grammatical elements and discourse purposes are deeply correlated.
 Methods For this purpose, the logogonetic patterns of systemic functional linguistics, a genre-based grammar theory, were utilized as a research method. Logogenetic patterns are a way to visibly show the relevance of grammatical meaning to the text being analyzed by showing the patterns of meaning that are generated as the text unfolds.
 Results Through the above study, we can see that grammatical elements(mood, modality and vocative) embodied in presidential inaugural addresses are selected and used to achieve the goals of understanding and persuasion. First, the declarative and probability are used to give reasons for the speaker's plans or demands. Next, the use of interrogative and vocative in presidential inaugural addresses serves to increase the intimacy between the speaker and the listener. The imperative, obligation, and complex modalities (obligation + probability) are used to require the listener to do something, but they take the form of obligation or complex modalities rather than the imperative in order to reduce the damage to the listener's face caused by the command. The inclination serves to announce the speaker's plans, while also expressing the speaker's commitment to the listener to fulfill those plans.
 Conclusions This study is significant because it is an example of how language use is not isolated from context, but is used within context. In addition, the usage patterns of mood, modality and vocative presented as research results will help understand the linguistic characteristics of presidential inaugural addresses. Furthermore, in expressive education such as speaking and writing in Korean education and Korean education as a foreign language, the meaning and function of mood, modality and vocative are expected to provide teaching and learning content on the use of language in a persuasive communication context. It is also expected to provide learners with interest and internal motivation in learning.

Planning multiple dependencies in sentence production

ABSTRACT One of the defining properties of human language is the abundance of potentially unbounded dependencies between elements in a sentence. And yet, how speakers formulate dependencies in sentence production is still poorly understood. Here we examine the timing of verb planning in sentences involving across-the-board and parasitic gap constructions. Using a new task we call the Sentence-Word Interference task, we show that speakers plan the verb of a secondary clause before sentence onset, but selectively when producing across-the-board sentences and not when producing parasitic gap sentences. Based on this timing contrast, we argue that speakers plan verbs predominantly before the production of their dependents, but only when verbs and their dependents engage in both conceptual and direct syntactic relationships. More broadly, the current study suggests that sentence planning is constrained by syntactic relationships that are not reducible to conceptual relationships or to surface word order.

Utterance planning under message uncertainty: evidence from a novel picture-namingparadigm.

Language researchers view utterance planning as implicit decision-making: producers must choose the words, sentence structures, and various other linguistic features to communicate their message. To date, much of the research on utterance planning has focused on situations in which the speaker knows the full message to convey. Less is known about circumstances in which speakers begin utterance planning before they are certain about their message. In three picture-naming experiments, we used a novel paradigm to examine how speakers plan utterances before a full message is known. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants viewed displays showing two pairs of objects, followed by a cue to name one pair. In an Overlap condition, one object appeared in both pairs, providing early information about one of the objects to name. In a Different condition, there was no object overlap. Across both spoken and typed responses, participants tended to name the overlapping target first in the Overlap condition, with shorter initiation latencies compared with other utterances. Experiment 3 used a semantically constraining question to provide early information about the upcoming targets, and participants tended to name the more likely target first in their response. These results suggest that in situations of uncertainty, producers choose word orders that allow them to begin early planning. Producers prioritize message components that are certain to be needed and continue planning the rest when more information becomes available. Given similarities to planning strategies for other goal-directed behaviors, we suggest continuity between decision-making processes in language and other cognitive domains.

Planning scope in second language sentence production: Do bilingual speakers plan ahead more in L1 than in L2?

AbstractLanguage production is incremental in nature; we tend to plan linguistic chunks prior to articulating the first word of the utterance. Researchers have acquired knowledge about how far ahead sentences are generally planned, but mostly in monolinguals or the speaker's first language (Allum & Wheeldon, 2007; Martin, Crowther, Knight, Tamborello II, & Yang, 2010; Wagner, Jescheniak, & Schriefers, 2010). It is unclear whether the scope of planning is the same in bilinguals, or the speaker's second language. Here, we examined planning scope in Dutch–English bilinguals' sentence production using a paradigm that elicits descriptions of short animations. Analyses of speech onset times and articulation durations suggest that, on the surface, bilinguals have comparable planning scope in L1 and L2. However, in their L2, bilinguals extended their articulation duration, suggesting that they committed early to the initial noun phrase, but produced it more slowly to buy time to plan the next noun phrase.

The role of speech planning in the articulation of pauses.

Extensive research has found that the duration of a pause is influenced by the length of an upcoming utterance, suggesting that speakers plan the upcoming utterance during this time. Research has more recently begun to examine articulation during pauses. A specific configuration of the vocal tract during acoustic pauses, termed pause posture (PP), has been identified in Greek and American English. However, the cognitive function giving rise to PPs is not well understood. The present study examines whether PPs are related to speech planning processes, such that they contribute additional planning time for an upcoming utterance. In an articulatory magnetometer study, the hypothesis is tested that an increase in upcoming utterance length leads to more frequent PP occurrence and that PPs are longer in pauses that precede longer phrases. The results indicate that PPs are associated with planning time for longer utterances but that they are associated with a relatively fixed scope of planning for upcoming speech. To further examine the relationship between articulation and speech planning, an additional hypothesis examines whether the first part of the pause predominantly serves to mark prosodic boundaries while the second part serves speech planning purposes. This hypothesis is not supported by the results.

Cognitive constraints on advance planning of sentence intonation.

Pitch peaks tend to be higher at the beginning of longer than shorter sentences (e.g., ‘A farmer is pulling donkeys’ vs ‘A farmer is pulling a donkey and goat’), whereas pitch valleys at the ends of sentences are rather constant for a given speaker. These data seem to imply that speakers avoid dropping their voice pitch too low by planning the height of sentence-initial pitch peaks prior to speaking. However, the length effect on sentence-initial pitch peaks appears to vary across different types of sentences, speakers and languages. Therefore, the notion that speakers plan sentence intonation in advance due to the limitations in low voice pitch leaves part of the data unexplained. Consequently, this study suggests a complementary cognitive account of length-dependent pitch scaling. In particular, it proposes that the sentence-initial pitch raise in long sentences is related to high demands on mental resources during the early stages of sentence planning. To tap into the cognitive underpinnings of planning sentence intonation, this study adopts the methodology of recording eye movements during a picture description task, as the eye movements are the established approximation of the real-time planning processes. Measures of voice pitch (Fundamental Frequency) and incrementality (eye movements) are used to examine the relationship between (verbal) working memory (WM), incrementality of sentence planning and the height of sentence-initial pitch peaks.

Evidence for F0 preplanning with delayed stimuli

A sentence production experiment was conducted to investigate F0 preplanning, specifically examining whether speakers plan pitch targets according to utterance length and whether preplanning limits dynamic control of pitch range. The experiment used a novel elicitation method in which visual stimuli that cue part of the utterance are delayed so that participants initiate the utterance without knowledge of its length. Participants read sentences in which the subject noun phrase was composed of one, two, or three conjoined noun phrases with controlled lexical and phonological content (e.g. Eight red weasels and nine green rhinos and eight blue llamas live in the zoo). On half of the trials with two and three noun phrases, the presentation of the visual stimuli that cued non-initial phrases (e.g., nine green rhinos and eight blue llamas) was delayed until after detection of utterance initiation. The effects of length and delay on F0 measures were analyzed. The results showed the length effect; the utterance-initial F0 peak was highest when three phrases were presented initially and lowest when one phrase was presented initially. Moreover, the utterance-initial peak in delayed stimuli was similar to that of the single phrase stimuli. In non-initial phrases, the pitch range of the delayed stimuli was constrained such that the F0 peak of the stimuli without delay was higher than those with delay. The findings suggest that speakers plan F0 targets and range before production, and such planning restricts subsequent control of F0.

Evidence of Absence: Abstract Metrical Structure in Speech Planning.

Rhythmic structure in speech is characterized by sequences of stressed and unstressed syllables. A large body of literature suggests that speakers of English attempt to achieve rhythmic harmony by evenly distributing stressed syllables throughout prosodic phrases. The question remains as to how speakers plan metrical structure during speech production and whether it is planned independently of phonemes. To examine this, we designed a tongue twister task consisting of disyllabic word pairs with overlapping phonological segments and either matching or non-matching metrical structure. Results showed that speakers had more difficulty producing metrically regular word pairs, compared to irregular pairs; that is, word pairs with irregular meter had faster productions and fewer speech errors in this production task. This finding of metrical regularity inhibiting production is inconsistent with an abstract metrical structure that is planned independently of phonemes at the point of phonological encoding.

Filling the gap in gap-filling: Long-distance dependency formation in sentence production

In a sentence like Who does the artist think chased the chef?, the who at the beginning depends on the last bit of the sentence, chased the chef. This is an instance of a long-distance dependency. What is the nature of the cognitive process that allows speakers to produce sentences that include distant elements that form dependencies? In four experiments, speakers described drawings that elicited long-distance dependencies. Critically, speakers were sometimes primed to produce a that in sentences where that was ungrammatical due to a grammatical constraint known as the that-trace constraint (e.g.,*Who does the artist think that chased the chef). Results showed that, when primed to say an ungrammatical that, speakers were slower to start to speak. Because the that-trace constraint applies selectively to certain configurations of long-distance dependencies, this suggests that the grammatical details of the long-distance dependency are already planned before speakers start to speak the sentences involving long-distance dependencies. I propose a formal model that explains how speakers plan long-distance dependencies in advance of speaking them while also managing the cognitive pressure to speak sentences incrementally.

Predicting One's Turn With Both Body and Mind: Anticipatory Speech Postures During Dyadic Conversation.

In natural conversation, turns are handed off quickly, with the mean downtime commonly ranging from 7 to 423 ms. To achieve this, speakers plan their upcoming speech as their partner’s turn unfolds, holding the audible utterance in abeyance until socially appropriate. The role played by prediction is debated, with some researchers claiming that speakers predict upcoming speech opportunities, and others claiming that speakers wait for detection of turn-final cues. The dynamics of articulatory triggering may speak to this debate. It is often assumed that the prepared utterance is held in a response buffer and then initiated all at once. This assumption is consistent with standard phonetic models in which articulatory actions must follow tightly prescribed patterns of coordination. This assumption has recently been challenged by single-word production experiments in which participants partly positioned their articulators to anticipate upcoming utterances, long before starting the acoustic response. The present study considered whether similar anticipatory postures arise when speakers in conversation await their next opportunity to speak. We analyzed a pre-existing audiovisual database of dyads engaging in unstructured conversation. Video motion tracking was used to determine speakers’ lip areas over time. When utterance-initial syllables began with labial consonants or included rounded vowels, speakers produced distinctly smaller lip areas (compared to other utterances), prior to audible speech. This effect was moderated by the number of words in the upcoming utterance; postures arose up to 3,000 ms before acoustic onset for short utterances of 1–3 words. We discuss the implications for models of conversation and phonetic control.

Selective activation of language specific structural representations: Evidence from extended picture-word interference

How do bilingual speakers represent and use information that guides the assembly of the words into phrases and sentences (i.e., sentence structures) for languages that have different word orders? Cross-language syntactic priming effects provide mixed evidence on whether bilinguals access sentence structures from both languages even when speaking just one. Here, we compared English monolinguals, Korean-immersed Korean-English bilinguals, and English-immersed Korean-English bilinguals while they produced noun phrases (“the lemon below the lobster”), which have different word orders in English and Korean (the Korean translation word order is [lobster][below][lemon]). We examined when speakers plan each noun using an extended picture-word interference paradigm, by measuring articulation times for each word in the phrase with either the distractor word “apple” (which slows the planning of “lemon”) or “crab” (which slows the planning of “lobster”). Results suggest that for phrases that are different in linear word order across languages, bilinguals only access the sentence structure of the one language they are actively speaking at the time, even when switching languages between trials.

Next speakers plan word forms in overlap with the incoming turn: evidence from gaze-contingent switch task performance

ABSTRACT To ensure short gaps between turns in conversation, next speakers regularly start planning their utterance in overlap with the incoming turn. Three experiments investigate which stages of utterance planning are executed in overlap. E1 establishes effects of associative and phonological relatedness of pictures and words in a switch-task from picture naming to lexical decision. E2 focuses on effects of phonological relatedness and investigates potential shifts in the time-course of production planning during background speech. E3 required participants to verbally answer questions as a base task. In critical trials, however, participants switched to visual lexical decision just after they began planning their answer. The task-switch was time-locked to participants' gaze for response planning. Results show that word form encoding is done as early as possible and not postponed until the end of the incoming turn. Hence, planning a response during the incoming turn is executed at least until word form activation.

The role of word order in bilingual speakers’ representation of their two languages: the case of Spanish–Kaqchikel bilinguals

When bilingual speakers plan to speak in one of their languages, the other language remains active and exerts an influence on the chosen language. However, the factors that modulate this influence, and particularly the extent to which syntactic structures and word order need to be the same in both languages for this influence to occur, are not yet fully understood. In this study, we explore the role of free word order in bilinguals’ representation of their two languages by analyzing the connections of linguistic representations in Spanish–Kaqchikel early bilinguals, two languages that allow word order variation in transitive sentences. In Experiment 1, a structural priming experiment within Kaqchikel was conducted with voice and word order of prime as independent variables. Results showed priming of both structure and word order, independently from each other. In Experiment 2, cross-linguistic structural priming was used from Spanish to Kaqchikel. Results showed priming of voice, regardless of word order, but not priming of word order. Taken together, these results suggest that, in languages with greater flexibility in their basic word orders, structural selection and word order choice seem to be independent processes.

How Referential Gestures Align With Speech: Evidence From Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers

AbstractWhen speaking, people often produce gestures that are closely timed with the speech with which they constitute a semantically coherent unit. Analyzing the temporal patterns between the two modalities may reveal insights about how speakers plan them. Using elicited narratives, we tested English/French monolinguals and bilinguals to check whether bilinguals, known to experience a higher degree of competition in lexical access, show a different pattern of gesture–speech alignment compared to that of monolinguals. Results revealed no difference in the temporal patterns between gestures and co‐semantic speech for the two language groups. Synchronous gestures were significantly more frequent than asynchronous ones; asynchronous gestures both preceded and followed the correlated speech, yet preceding gestures tended to occur more often. A qualitative analysis conducted for asynchronous gestures revealed that they may serve a rhetoric function. We argue that the variability in gesture–speech timing results from speakers’ strategic use of gesture.

Beyond linear order: The role of argument structure in speaking

The current study examines how speakers plan sentences in which two words that form hierarchical dependency relationships - arguments and verbs - appear far apart in linear distance, to investigate how linear and hierarchical aspects of sentences simultaneously shape sentence planning processes. The results of six extended picture-word interference experiments suggest that speakers retrieve sentence-final verbs before the articulation of their sentence-initial patient or theme arguments, but not agent arguments, and before retrieving sentence-medial nouns inside modifiers. These results suggest that the time-course of sentence planning reflects hierarchically-defined dependency relationships over and above linear structure.

Compounds, phrases and clitics in connected speech

Abstract Four language production experiments examine how English speakers plan compound words during phonological encoding. The experiments tested production latencies in both delayed and online tasks for English noun-noun compounds (e.g., daytime), adjective-noun phrases (e.g., dark time), and monomorphemic words (e.g., denim). In delayed production, speech onset latencies reflect the total number of prosodic units in the target sentence. In online production, speech latencies reflect the size of the first prosodic unit. Compounds are metrically similar to adjective-noun phrases as they contain two lexical and two prosodic words. However, in Experiments 1 and 2, native English speakers treated the compounds as single prosodic units, indistinguishable from simple words, with RT data statistically different than that of the adjective-noun phrases. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that compounds are also treated as single prosodic units in utterances containing clitics (e.g., dishcloths are clean) as they incorporate the verb into a single phonological word (i.e. dishcloths-are). Taken together, these results suggest that English compounds are planned as single recursive prosodic units. Our data require an adaptation of the classic model of phonological encoding to incorporate a distinction between lexical and postlexical prosodic processes, such that lexical boundaries have consequences for post-lexical phonological encoding.

Next Speakers Plan Their Turn Early and Speak after Turn-Final "Go-Signals".

In conversation, turn-taking is usually fluid, with next speakers taking their turn right after the end of the previous turn. Most, but not all, previous studies show that next speakers start to plan their turn early, if possible already during the incoming turn. The present study makes use of the list-completion paradigm (Barthel et al., 2016), analyzing speech onset latencies and eye-movements of participants in a task-oriented dialogue with a confederate. The measures are used to disentangle the contributions to the timing of turn-taking of early planning of content on the one hand and initiation of articulation as a reaction to the upcoming turn-end on the other hand. Participants named objects visible on their computer screen in response to utterances that did, or did not, contain lexical and prosodic cues to the end of the incoming turn. In the presence of an early lexical cue, participants showed earlier gaze shifts toward the target objects and responded faster than in its absence, whereas the presence of a late intonational cue only led to faster response times and did not affect the timing of participants' eye movements. The results show that with a combination of eye-movement and turn-transition time measures it is possible to tease apart the effects of early planning and response initiation on turn timing. They are consistent with models of turn-taking that assume that next speakers (a) start planning their response as soon as the incoming turn's message can be understood and (b) monitor the incoming turn for cues to turn-completion so as to initiate their response when turn-transition becomes relevant.

Brains in dialogue: decoding neural preparation of speaking to a conversational partner.

In dialogue, language processing is adapted to the conversational partner. We hypothesize that the brain facilitates partner-adapted language processing through preparatory neural configurations (task sets) that are tailored to the conversational partner. In this experiment, we measured neural activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while healthy participants in the scanner (a) engaged in a verbal communication task with a conversational partner outside of the scanner, or (b) spoke outside of a conversational context (to test the microphone). Using multivariate searchlight analysis, we identify cortical regions that represent information on whether speakers plan to speak to a conversational partner or without having a partner. Most notably a region that has been associated with processing social-affective information and perspective taking, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, as well as regions that have been associated with prospective task representation, the bilateral ventral prefrontal cortex, are involved in encoding the speaking condition. Our results suggest that speakers prepare, in advance of speaking, for the social context in which they will speak.

Contextual phonological errors and omission of obligatory liaison as a window into a reduced span of phonological encoding

ABSTRACTBackground: The question of how much speakers plan ahead before they start articulating their message is essential to understand how fluency is ensured during speech production. This question has been largely investigated in healthy speakers. Surprisingly, this remains unexplored for brain-damaged speakers, even though a reduced span of encoding might account for the fact that those impaired speakers often produce scattered speech.Aims: In this study, we examine whether the span of encoding is reduced in some left hemisphere brain-damaged speakers by taking advantage of two linguistic phenomena which provide an insight into ahead phonological planning.Methods and procedures: First, we elicit the production of French sequences involving obligatory liaisons (e.g., /mõ/ and /ami/ produced /mõ.nami/), for which the correct production requires ahead planning, at least up to the first phoneme of the following word of the utterance. Second, we use tongue-twister-like sequences in order to elicit contextual phonological errors, as phoneme anticipation errors (e.g., bureau vert—green desk—produced /vyRo.vER/) suggest that the speaker has planned ahead before articulating. If brain-damaged speakers do present a reduced span of encoding, they should both produce a high rate of liaison consonant omissions and a low rate of anticipation contextual phonological errors.Outcome and results: The results on a group of 13 speakers with aphasia and/or apraxia of speech overall show few contextual (syntagmatic) errors despite a high rate of segmental errors, whereas the majority of phonological errors produced on the same utterances by healthy speakers were syntagmatic. The speech/language impaired participants also presented a high rate of obligatory liaison consonants omission. Crucially, a negative correlation was observed between the rate of phoneme anticipation errors and the rate of liaison consonant omission.Conclusion: These results suggest that some brain-damaged speakers present a span of phonological encoding limited to single words and that the use of inter-word sandhi phenomena, such as French liaison and the analysis of phoneme anticipation errors, are valid linguistic tools to inform on the span of encoding.

Lexical Planning in Sentence Production Is Highly Incremental: Evidence from ERPs.

The scope of lexical planning, which means how far ahead speakers plan lexically before they start producing an utterance, is an important issue for research into speech production, but remains highly controversial. The present research investigated this issue using the semantic blocking effect, which refers to the widely observed effects that participants take longer to say aloud the names of items in pictures when the pictures in a block of trials in an experiment depict items that belong to the same semantic category than different categories. As this effect is often interpreted as a reflection of difficulty in lexical selection, the current study took the semantic blocking effect and its associated pattern of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as a proxy to test whether lexical planning during sentence production extends beyond the first noun when a subject noun-phrase includes two nouns, such as “The chair and the boat are both red” and “The chair above the boat is red”. The results showed a semantic blocking effect both in onset latencies and in ERPs during the utterance of the first noun of these complex noun-phrases but not for the second noun. The indication, therefore, is that the lexical planning scope does not encompass this second noun-phrase. Indeed, the present findings are in line with accounts that propose radically incremental lexical planning, in which speakers plan ahead only one word at a time. This study also provides a highly novel example of using ERPs to examine the production of long utterances, and it is hoped the present demonstration of the effectiveness of this approach inspires further application of ERP techniques in this area of research.