Search for: All records

This paper discusses the relationship between monitoring, control, conscious awareness, and attention in language production. Instead of focusing on a speci昀椀c theory, I will examine these relationships within a framework that accommodates multiple (complementary) monitoring views, and discuss key differences between situations where competition is resolved internally vs. those that recruit external control. The takeaway message is that production performance is optimized by self-regulating monitoring-control loops, which operate largely subconsciously, but conscious awareness can be —and often is— triggered by the monitor. When triggered, in conjunction with the control system, such awareness can lead to attentional control of both the primary production process, as well as the monitoring process. I will also touch upon the repair process and its relation to these issues, and end by discussing some of the open questions as possible avenues for future research. 

Word production is the process of turning a thought into motor movements that produce a spoken word. This process has traditionally been studied using two approaches — the psycholinguistic approach and the motor speech approach — that focus on dierent stages of the production process. In this Perspective, I highlight the strengths of these two approaches and merge them with broader frameworks and theories of action and cognition to open new directions for language production research. I discuss proposed models for how speakers assess whether production is going smoothly (monitoring), adjust to diculties (control) and x errors (repair). Each proposal combines language production research with insights from other areas of cognition to demonstrate the utility and necessity of a closer integration of broader cognitive frameworks into models of word production. 

Abstract Perception changes rapidly and implicitly as a function of passive exposure to speech that samples different acoustic distributions. Past research has shown that this statistical learning generalizes across talkers and, to some extent, new items, but these studies involved listeners’ active engagement in processing statistics-bearing stimuli. In this study, we manipulated the relationship between voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0) to establish distributional regularities either aligned with American English or reversed to create a subtle foreign accent. We then tested whether statistical learning across passive exposure to these distributions generalized to new items never experienced in the accent. Experiment 1 showed statistical learning across passive exposure but no generalization of learning when exposure and test items shared the same initial consonant but differed in vowels (bear/pear → beer/pier) or when they differed in initial consonant but shared distributional regularities across VOT and F0 dimensions (deer/tear → beer/pier). Experiment 2 showed generalization to stimuli that shared the statistics-bearing phoneme (bear/pear → beer/pier), but only when the response set included tokens from both exposure and generalization stimuli. Moreover, statistical learning transferred to influence the subtle acoustics of listeners’ own speech productions but did not generalize to influence productions of stimuli not heard in the accent. In sum, passive exposure is thus sufficient to support statistical learning and its generalization, but task demands modulate this dynamic. Moreover, production does not simply mirror perception: generalization in perception was not accompanied by transfer to production. 

In two experiments (N = 179), we studied the effects of contextual similarity and training mode on the comprehension of new vocabulary. Participants were trained on new vocabulary in blocks of semantically similar, phonologically similar, or unrelated items. Each participant was trained through passive exposure, active comprehension, or active production. Same number of items were trained in clusters of 9 in Experiment 1 and clusters of 3 in Experiment 2, manipulating difficulty during training. Results showed a detrimental and persistent effect of semantic similarity, and a less robust effect of phonological similarity, both of which grew larger over time. We also found a negative and largely independent influence of production mode on learning, which, contrary to the similarity effect, shrank with time. Neither effect was modulated by difficulty at training time. These findings shed further light on the factors influencing new vocabulary learning and open new avenues for larger-scale and classroom-level studies. 

Abstract For both adults and children, learning from one's mistakes (error‐based learning) has been shown to be advantageous over avoiding errors altogether (errorless learning) in pedagogical settings. However, it remains unclear whether this advantage carries over to nonpedagogical settings in children, who mostly learn language in such settings. Using irregular plurals (e.g., “mice”) as a test case, we conducted a corpus analysis (N= 227) and two preregistered experiments (N= 56,N= 99), to investigate the potency of error‐based learning as a mechanism for language acquisition in 3‐ and 4‐year‐old children. The results of the corpus analysis showed that incidental feedback after errors, in the form of caregivers’ reformulations of children's errors, was relatively infrequent, had modest informational value, and was rarely used by children to correct their errors immediately. The following two experiments contrasted error‐based learning with errorless learning, where the correct utterance was modeled for the child before a potential error was committed. The results showed that error‐based learning was not always effective, and when it was, it was certainly not superior to errorless learning. Collectively, these findings question the extension of the benefits of error‐based learning from pedagogical to nonpedagogical settings and define constraints under which one mechanism may be more beneficial to learning than the other. 

Given the fundamental role of working memory (WM) in all domains of cognition, a central question has been whether WM is domain-general. However, the term ‘domain-general’ has been used in different, and sometimes misleading, ways. By reviewing recent evidence and biologically plausible models of WM, we show that the level of domain-generality varies substantially between three facets of WM: in terms of computations, WM is largely domain-general. In terms of neural correlates, it contains both domain-general and domain-specific elements. Finally, in terms of application, it is mostly domain-specific. This variance encourages a shift of focus towards uncovering domain-general computational principles and away from domain-general approaches to the analysis of individual differences and WM training, favoring newer perspectives, such as training-as-skill-learning. 

Abstract Communicating with a speaker with a different accent can affect one’s own speech. Despite the strength of evidence for perception-production transfer in speech, the nature of transfer has remained elusive, with variable results regarding the acoustic properties that transfer between speakers and the characteristics of the speakers who exhibit transfer. The current study investigates perception-production transfer through the lens of statistical learning across passive exposure to speech. Participants experienced a short sequence of acoustically variable minimal pair (beer/pier) utterances conveying either an accent or typical American English acoustics, categorized a perceptually ambiguous test stimulus, and then repeated the test stimulus aloud. In thecanonicalcondition, /b/–/p/ fundamental frequency (F0) and voice onset time (VOT) covaried according to typical English patterns. In thereversecondition, the F0xVOT relationship reversed to create an “accent” with speech input regularities atypical of American English. Replicating prior studies, F0 played less of a role in perceptual speech categorization in reverse compared with canonical statistical contexts. Critically, this down-weighting transferred to production, with systematic down-weighting of F0 in listeners’ own speech productions in reverse compared with canonical contexts that was robust across male and female participants. Thus, the mapping of acoustics to speech categories is rapidly adjusted by short-term statistical learning across passive listening and these adjustments transfer to influence listeners’ own speech productions. 

Abstract Most research showing that cognates are named faster than non-cognates has focused on isolated word production which might not realistically reflect cognitive demands in sentence production. Here, we explored whether cognates elicit interference by examining error rates during sentence production, and how this interference is resolved by language control mechanisms. Twenty highly proficient Spanish–English bilinguals described visual scenes with sentence structures ‘NP1-verb-NP2’ (NP = noun-phrase). Half the nouns and half the verbs were cognates and two manipulations created high control demands. Both situations that demanded higher inhibitory control pushed the cognate effect from facilitation towards interference. These findings suggest that cognates, similar to phonologically similar words within a language, can induce not only facilitation but robust interference.