Processes of incremental message planning during conversation

Abstract

Speaking begins with the formulation of an intended preverbal message and linguistic encoding of this information. The transition from thought to speech occurs incrementally, with cascading planning at subsequent levels of production. In this article, we aim to specify the mechanisms that support incremental message preparation. We contrast two hypotheses about the mechanisms responsible for incorporating message-level information into a linguistic plan. According to the Initial Preparation view, messages can be encoded as fluent utterances if all information is ready before speaking begins. By contrast, on the Continuous Incrementality view, messages can be continually prepared and updated throughout the production process, allowing for fluent production even if new information is added to the message while speaking is underway. Testing these hypotheses, eye-tracked speakers in two experiments produced unscripted, conjoined noun phrases with modifiers. Both experiments showed that new message elements can be incrementally incorporated into the utterance even after articulation begins, consistent with a Continuous Incrementality view of message planning, in which messages percolate to linguistic encoding immediately as that information becomes available in the mind of the speaker. We conclude by discussing the functional role of incremental message planning in conversational speech and the situations in which this continuous incremental planning would be most likely to be observed.

The Role of Verbs in Sentence Production

“…Such a scenario is compatible with the considerable amount of evidence pointing to the incremental nature of sentence production (e.g., Meyer, 1996;Schriefers et al, 1998;van de Velde et al, 2014;Brown-Schmidt and Konopka, 2015;Zhao and Yang, 2016) as initially hypothesized by Kempen and Hoenkamp (1987). According to this, speakers do not necessarily wait for all the bits and pieces of a phrase or sentence to have been processed and set in their places before they start uttering it.…”

Production Practice During Language Learning Improves Comprehension

“…This situation should afford a stronger learning opportunity than in comprehension, where the input signal and the message that the comprehender gleans from it unfold over time. Language production also requires the generation of an utterance plan, and because planning precedes execution by some time, planning entails maintaining information in working memory (Brown-Schmidt & Konopka, 2015). Indeed, MacDonald (2016) argued that the utterance plan is the maintenance portion of verbal working memory.…”

The Now-or-Never bottleneck: A fundamental constraint on language

“…Turning to production, we start by noting the powerful intuition that we speak "into the void"that is, that we plan only a short distance ahead. Indeed, experimental studies suggest that, for example, when producing an utterance involving several noun phrases, people plan just one (Smith & Wheeldon 1999), or perhaps two, noun phrases ahead (Konopka 2012), and they can modify a message during production in the light of new perceptual input (Brown-Schmidt & Konopka 2015). Moreover, speecherror data (e.g., Cutler 1982) reveal that, across representational levels, errors tend to be highly local: Phonological, morphemic, and syntactic errors apply to neighboring chunks within each level (where material may be moved, swapped, or deleted).…”