6. Language Production

Production, a linguistic term, refers to the study of how people say what they do say. In language processing, the speaker has both information and intention to communicate. He has a message to communicate and the competence to encode the message. The hearer only has incoming speech, and not the underlying intention which generated that particular utterance. So, the hearer has to decode the signal and reconstruct the message intended by the speaker in order to compute the meaning or information. It is obviously an the ambiguous sentence (as in (3) or (4) or/and (5) above) that becomes the source of a trouble for the hearer and not for the speaker since the later always knows what he wants to say as the utterance is produced. Owing to such different participative roles of the speaker and the hearer, strategies for comprehension and production are not similar. It is likely that the units of both comprehension and production may differ even though the processes happen to be related.

Study of speech production also shows that in the spoken process the match between what the speaker wishes to say and what he actually does is rarely a perfect one. It is because during speaking the speaker might produce some errors such as pauses, hesitation, repeats or replacements of the word and so on, as he seeks to encode his ideas into speech. Such errors occur only because the speaker either is busy in processing something to speak or wants to avail the proper kind of lexicon to what he is describing. These anomalous utterances, according to Fromkin (1971), are really quite nonanomalous in nature. Linguists have for long examined the nature and range of errors which often appear in the process of language production. And speech errors thus have become a main source of data to offer significant insights into language production. Analysis of speech errors or slips of tongue thus constitute the primary task in the study of speech production.

Several corpora of spontaneous speech errors then have been made by researchers such as Fromkin (1971), Garrett (1975) and Shattuck-Hufnagel (1979) in order to outline a framework for a theory of sentence production and also to enable one have better insights into the consistent patterns showing when and how they occur. Speech errors, no doubt, cover a wide range of semantic content. Researchers have proposed the eight basic types of speech errors consisting of (i) shift, (ii) exchange, (iii) anticipation, (iv) perseveration, (v) addition, (vi) deletion, (vii) substitution, and (viii) blend.

Shift occurs as one speech segment disappears from its appropriate location and appears somewhere else. Exchange, also known as metathesis, refers to where two linguistic units exchange places (double shifts) and thus involves a reversal of two elements. Anticipation occurs when a later segment takes the place of an earlier one (the segment is used twice: at the place it intrudes on another and at its correct location). Perseveration occurs when an earlier segment replaces a later item whereas addition refers to adding a linguistic element. On the contrary, deletion refers to the loss of an element. Substitution occurs when one segment is replaced by an intruder (the source of the intrusion may not be in the sentence), often closely related in its semantic field. Such an error occurs due to the right choice from the speaker’s mental dictionary, but accessing the wrong word. Besides, word substitutions may also occur due to other factors such as contextual constraints and phonetic or formal similarity, for example, mushroom for mustache, cabinet for catalog (Garrett 1988). Blend occurs where two or more words ‘fuse’ or ‘blend’ into a single item (Kess 1992: 59).

A remarkable feature of errors is that they tend to occur at one linguistic level for each utterance and thus the utterance tends to remain syntactically, prosodically and phonologically undamaged. Pauses of silence, hesitation phenomena, repairs, specific language disorders are other types of evidence in addition to tongue slips which indicate that language processing is a complex process that involves mental and cognitive operations.

Table 1: Major Types of Slips of the Tongue
Source: David W. Carroll (1994:192).

Type	Example
Shift	That’s so she’ll be ready in case she decide to hits it (decides to hit it).
Exchange	Fancy getting your model renosed (getting your nose remodeled).
Anticipation	Bake me bike (take my bike).
Perseveration	He pulled a pantrum (tantrum).
Addition	I didn’t explain this clarefully enough (carefully enough).
Deletion	I’ll just g et up and mutter intelligibly (unintelligibly).
Substitution	At low speech it’s too light (heavy).
Blend	That child is looking to be spaddled (spanked/paddled).

Garrett (1975) proposed that sentence production was accomplished in a number of serially ordered independent stages, and speech errors can be found at the stages of word selection and phrase construction, as well as in the actual phonological coding of the utterance. Garrett (1988) proposed a model with two different levels of speech production: (i) syntactic or functional level, which elicits the grammatical and semantic features of a lexical item, and (ii) phonological or positional level which retrieves the actual phonological shape of the word. The two-stage assumption explains a number of regularities in speech errors, including the fact that word exchanges and sound exchanges have different characteristics. Sound exchanges usually span only a word or two; it can involve sounds from words that differ in syntactic class. Due to the phonetic similarity, the participating sounds emerge as close neighbours. In contrast, word exchanges typically occur with words of the same syntactic class, they can occur across a span of several words in the same phrase or even into the next clause, and the participating words, therefore, need not necessarily have phonological similarity. For these differences between sound exchanges and word exchanges, Garrett sought to assume that word exchanges occur at a functional level whereas sound exchanges (or phonological exchanges) at the positional level. He also pointed out that function words do not happen to participate in sound exchanges as they tend to be inserted at functional level. Garrett’s approach has been extended by Lapointe (1985) with providing a detailed model for how inflectional and derivational affixes are accessed to explain the pattern of inflectional errors produced by agrammatics.

Some psychological explanations have argued for speech errors reflecting factors external to the linguistic structure of the utterance itself. Such a view is close to the Fruedian explanation that deeper meanings could be read into one’s speech errors, that such freudian slips arose from our hidden motives and anxieties, and that “anxiety-producing situations will increase the incidence of speech errors. And such slips have even been induced by introducing the presence of such factors” (Kess 1992: 62). Such psychological explanation though attractive in some case where the slips result in a word with emotional significance only in some cases, many slips seem to reflect very simple processes as in the anticipation or perseveration of phonetic segments for instance.

Most of the contemporary linguistic research has focused on the insights achieved in understanding language mechanisms from the study of speech errors. Errors of linguistic performance occupy a role in psycholinguistic theories similar to the one played by aphasic disorders in insights for normal language functioning. Evidence made by researchers that segments that alter and move in speech errors are accurately those postulated by linguistic theories (Fromkin 1971). Error data have also been used to argue for a possible autonomous syntactic processor (Garrett 1975, 1980). Researchers claim that in language production, one produces utterances through a series of stages, each devoted to a different level of linguistic analysis and speech errors thus can provide a good deal of evidence of what these specific stages might look like (Carroll 1994).

Language production is an intrinsically more difficult process than language comprehension. It is because production rules are not as easily accessed by experimental techniques as they are in comprehension. In comprehension, it is relatively easy to identify the ideas a person computes from a segment of speech whereas the process of production needs to consider where ideas for speech come from. In general, speech production is a complex process but an ordered activity. However, unlike in comprehendsion, the generative enterprise of linguistic theory has had only a limited influence on the theory and research in language production.