The Influence of Word Retrieval and Planning on Phonetic Variation: Implications for Exemplar Models

Abstract

Over the past several decades, an increasing number of empirical studies have documented the interaction of information across the traditional linguistic modules of phonetics, phonology, and lexicon. For example, the frequency with which a word occurs influences its phonetic properties of its sounds; high frequency words tend to be reduced relative to low frequency words. Lexicalist Exemplar Models have been successful in accounting for this body of results through a single mechanism, exemplars— memory representations that integrate lexical, phonological, and phonetic information into a single structure. We review recent studies that suggest there are critical limitations to assuming that phonetic variation solely reflects the storage of word labels and sound structure in exemplars. Specifically, these studies show that factors related to the on-line retrieval and planning of lexical items also influence phonetic variation. The implications of these findings for exemplar models are discussed; the relationship of exemplar storage to the broader cognitive system is examined, as well as alternative theoretical frameworks incorporating gradience at all levels of linguistic representation.

Variation in the speech signal as a window into the cognitive architecture of language production

“…Cascaded activation can also readily explain why speech errors show acoustic features of the intended production (Goldrick & Chu, 2014; see also McMillan & Corley, 2010). These accounts assume, as in Fink and Goldrick (2015), that although representations are abstract, their activation is gradient (in line with proposals in articulatory phonology; e.g., Browman & Goldstein, 1990). Cascading-activation accounts can also explain predictability/repetition effects.…”

“…Frequent words will therefore tend to be more reduced, and these reduced exemplars will in turn be stored, influencing subsequent productions. Exemplarist accounts can also account for some contextual effects, including social factors, by storing knowledge about the context in which the words are produced together with the exemplars (see also Fink & Goldrick, 2015), or by assuming that the speaker's representation of the state of the listener influences the selection of exemplars (e.g., more reduced exemplars selected when the word is predictable). These models can also account for phrase frequency effects by assuming that not only words but also whole utterances are represented in long-term memory (see Arnon & Cohen Priva, 2013; but see Baayen et al, 2013;Hendrix et al, 2017).…”

“…These models can also account for phrase frequency effects by assuming that not only words but also whole utterances are represented in long-term memory (see Arnon & Cohen Priva, 2013; but see Baayen et al, 2013;Hendrix et al, 2017). Exemplar-based models cannot account for all observations, however (see Fink & Goldrick, 2015, for an extensive discussion). For instance, whereas exemplar-based models could account for phonological neighborhood effects by storing this lexical property with the exemplars, they cannot readily explain why these effects vary across tasks.…”

“…Despite recent efforts that specifically target aspects of phonetic variability (e.g., Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand, & Jurafsky, 2009;Fink & Goldrick, 2015;Gahl, Yao, & Johnson, 2012;Kahn & Arnold, 2012;Peramunage, Blumstein, Myers, Goldrick, & Baese-Berk, 2010), the relevance of variation data for our understanding of the language production system is clearly not sufficiently recognized. Too few studies have applied the methods of experimental psychology to study the encoding of pronunciation variants; in particular, there is an important gap between the range of variation phenomena reported in other fields of language sciences, and the restricted number of variation phenomena examined in psycholinguistic studies.…”

“…Ernestus (2014) reviewed data on acoustic reduction and discusses their implications for both recognition and production. Fink and Goldrick (2015) discussed recent findings on phonetic variation and their implications for the mental lexicon. The present review further builds on these previous efforts to integrate views from different fields in order to get a better view of the language-processing system (see, e.g., Hickok, 2014).…”