Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Time Course of Givenness Effects in Language Production Models

Speaking effectively requires producing multiple words in a row, smoothly and efficiently. The relative ease we experience while doing this belies its complexity. When planning what to say, we engage in processes like selecting words, choosing appropriate sounds for those words, and ensuring that each word receives enough attention to get produced quickly and accurately. Understanding these individual processes, and thus how people produce language, requires understanding the timing of each word. This project explores the relationship between basic processes in language production, such as choosing a word and its sounds, and the duration of that and surrounding words.

The experiments test the hypothesis that facilitating the process of selecting a word or selecting its sounds influences that word's duration. Further, they test whether this effect extends to each of the words surrounding the facilitated word. The method modifies an established paradigm, the Picture-Word Interference (PWI) task, to investigate the timing and involvement of semantic and phonological processing. Participants name a picture while ignoring a spoken distractor. Distractors influence processing when they relate closely in meaning or sound, so the experiment controls these relationships. It also controls the relative timing of the appearance of the pictures and distracters, which influences processing as well. This tight control over timing and relatedness allows for a close investigation of how sub-processes of language production contribute to the duration of individual words. It will also show how facilitation of meaning-irrelevant processing affects the duration of surrounding words.

Understanding the processes that underlie duration is fundamentally important for understanding speech production, because the duration of each word in a sentence reflects not only its own processing, but also how the production system manages multiple words simultaneously. This project will take the first steps toward understanding the relationship between processing and duration. It will also support the scientific training of a promising scholar.