Infants (from Latin infans, speechless) are human beings who cannot speak. It took most of us the whole first year of our lives to overcome this infancy and to produce our first few meaningful words, but we were not idle as infants. We worked, rather independently, on two basic ingredients of word production. On the one hand, we established our primary notions of agency, interactancy, the temporal and causal structures of events, object permanence and location. This provided us with a matrix for the creation of our first lexical concepts, concepts flagged by way of a verbal label. Initially, these word labels were exclusively auditory patterns, picked up from the environment. On the other hand, we created a repertoire of babbles, a set of syllabic articulatory gestures. These motor patterns normally spring up around the seventh month. The child carefully attends to their acoustic manifestations, leading to elaborate exercises in the repetition and concatenation of these syllabic patterns. In addition, these audiomotor patterns start resonating with real speech input, becoming more and more tuned to the mother tongue (De Boysson-Bardies & Vihman 1991;Elbers 1982). These exercises provided us with a protosyllabary, a core repository of speech motor patterns, which were, however, completely meaningless.Real word production begins when the child starts connecting some particular babble (or a modification thereof ) to some particular lexical concept. The privileged babble auditorily resembles the word label that the child has acquired perceptually. Hence word production emerges from a coupling of two initially independent systems, a conceptual system and an articulatory motor system. This duality is never lost in the further maturation of our word production system. Between the ages of 1;6 and 2;6 the explosive growth of the lexicon soon overtaxes the protosyllabary. It is increasingly hard to keep all the relevant wholeword gestures apart. The child conquers this strain on the system by dismantling the word gestures through a process of phonemization; words become generatively represented as concatenations of phonological segments (Elbers & Wijnen 1992;C. Levelt 1994). As a consequence, phonetic encoding of words becomes supported by a system of phono-BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1999) Abstract: Preparing words in speech production is normally a fast and accurate process. We generate them two or three per second in fluent conversation; and overtly naming a clear picture of an object can easily be initiated within 600 msec after picture onset. The underlying process, however, is exceedingly complex. The theory reviewed in this target article analyzes this process as staged and feedforward. After a first stage of conceptual preparation, word generation proceeds through lexical selection, morphological and phonological encoding, phonetic encoding, and articulation itself. In addition, the speaker exerts some degree of output control, by monitoring of self-produced internal and overt speech. The core of the theory, ...
