1

Author: Imen Aggoune

Speech Production Process

Language is the most important means of communication created by human civilization.

It is a way to share ideas, opinions, thoughts, and, most importantly, knowledge. As Sapir (1931,
p.105) already stated, "Language is the communicative process par excellence in every known
society." It is illustrated mainly with two forms/versions: written and spoken. In
psycholinguistics, the latter is considered one of the most complex linguistic behaviours
processed by the human brain, as it involves many and various cognitive operations. Still,
despite its complexity, most speakers seem to easily, quickly, and autonomously produce
spoken language and simultaneously understood by the hearers (listeners). That is, the
successful speaking process involves both language comprehension and language production.
First, the speaker must be fully aware, conscious, and cognizant of the language system shared
by the speech community. That is to say, the words, their semantic meanings (lemmas), and
their different combinations and structures have to be well acknowledged by the speaker -for
him- to construct a well-formed, comprehensible linguistic message. Second, with the speaker
having the necessary linguistic knowledge, he/she can, therefore, produce spoken language.
According to Fields (2004), language production refers to the process in which meaning is
created and expressed through language. Particularly, although the language is abstractly stored
in the mind, it is concretely demonstrated in speech and into linguistic messages. On that
account, these intended messages are transmitted from the addresser's mind to the addressee's
via speech. The speech, in turn, is segmented into separate but related units (linguistically,
utterances); each utterance consists of a couple of words that are grammatically and
semantically compatible with a specific context.

Although in daily life, speech can happen very rapidly and spontaneously, its process
involves many procedures. According to Levelt (1989), the speech production is mainly
divided into four major steps:

Conceptualization:

Conceptualization or the "conceptualizer" is the first component in Levelt's

psycholinguistic model of speech production. It is the phase where speech sparks. It refers to
the process of generating and monitoring messages. In this stage, the speaker starts by
generating or initiating intention and thus formulate it and encode it into a coherent
conceptual/pre-verbal plan that consists of several chunks in the mind. Besides, this component
also monitors what is about to be said and how it is going to be said; the speaker mentally puts
forward a plan that guides his/her speech. In order for the message to be well generated/created,
the speaker needs declarative knowledge (DK), including the person's general experience of
 2

the world (encyclopaedic knowledge), knowledge about the current situation, and knowledge
about the discourse record (what has already been said).

Formulation:

"Formulator' is the next component in Levelt's model. After the conceptual plan was
already prepared and organized, the speaker's mind can easily and instantly start picking out
the lexicons that correspond to and are needed in a specific context. In other words, message
formulation is the process by which the speaker transforms a mental concept into linguistic
items (structures) in the mind (scattered lexicons). Therefore, in this step, grammatical and
phonological encoding takes place; both involve lexical access procedures and syntactic
procedures. Each chunk of the conceptual plan triggers/activates a set of lemmas (semantic
information of words); however, only the lemmas that receive the highest activation will match
the concepts in the pre-verbal plan. To exemplify, if a person wants to say, "the woman met
the man in the village," only four content words ‘woman', 'meet', 'man', 'village' will receive
the highest activation out of 30,000 average of active words in the mind. After the lemma is
retrieved, its syntactic properties become available, and thus, it will be easier for the speaker
to form syntactic structures in the mind, including syntactic category, grammatical function…
In this level, all that the speaker has is a thin string of lemmas that are semantically and
syntactically organized into phrases in the mind; however, the complete forms are yet to be
specified.

Articulation:

The next component in this model is the "articulator," which is responsible for the motor
execution of the phonetic plan (it involves speech organs). This phonetic plan will be formed
into a buffered speech (internal speech) that will instantly trigger the motor commands which
will finally cause articulation of the message, that is, executing the motor movements necessary
to properly produce the sounds structure of the phrase and its constituent words.

Self-monitoring:

This step exclusively refers to error correction and self-repairs. Speech can be
interrupted by hesitation, stops, repetitions, all because speakers tend to spontaneously correct
themselves once they make a mistake. self-repairs starts when speakers detect an error and
intend to correct it; they may utter some editing expression, such as uh, I mean, sorry, err, and
then finally repair/correct the utterance by saying a potentially more correct version of the
previously uttered phrase/sentence.
 3

References:

- Aseel Kazum Mahmoud (2014): Psycholinguistics: The Production of Language.

- Wikipedia.org
- Researchgate.net