Language production

Language Use and Understanding BCS 261 LIN 241 PSY 261 CLASS 12: BRANIGAN ET AL.: PRIMING

Clarification for Midterm 

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We read several studies that investigated some of the choices that speakers make during production. Describe three factors that influence one of these choices, making it clear what choice each is relevant to. You may want to consider the following papers for this question: Schober & Clark, Brennan, Snedeker et al., Branigan et al. Big question: what is the production system like?  

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How do we retrieve words? (Dell) How do speakers make prosodic choices? (Snedeker et al.) How do speakers make choices about the grammatical form of the utterance? (Branigan et al.) How do speakers choose an expression to refer to something? (Schober & Clark; Brennan).

Language production  

Choose Words Put them together into phrases Choose proper inflection  Put in order  Prosodic choices 

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Pronounce the utterance

How do speakers put words together into utterances?  

Message (nonlinguistic) Grammatical processing 

Functional processing Lemma selection (word selection)  Assign grammatical roles (subj, obj, etc. ) 

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Positional processing

Semantic errors happen here

Phonological  Lexical retrieval (includes phonological info) errors  Constituent assembly happen here

Phonological encoding

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How do speakers assemble the constituents of their utterance?

A lot is determined by the message 

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E.g., John runs.

But speakers have many choices 

Active/ Passive I see you.  You are seen by me. 

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Dative alternation -- same meaning, diff. form I give you the book  I give the book to you. 

Discussion Questions 

1.) How is sentence form so important here when in previous articles people tend to focus more on the meaning and content of sentences? (Jessica DeSisto)

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When Branigan states that the experiment demonstrates co-ordination based on form rather than meaning what does she mean? (MR)

Choice of Syntactic Structure 

People tend to repeat structures I gave John the book.  I sold my neighbor my old lawnmower. 

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Effect is not dependent on lexical items being repeated This means that there is a representation of the syntactic structure itself (or the relations inherent in the structure) Priming effects can last hours or days (cf. J. Blake and A. Shook’s Qs)

Additional considerations 

Speakers tend to produce more accessible things earlier in an utterance “topical” things tend to come earlier (Cf Brennan’s finding that centers are produced as subject)  Accessible words come earlier 

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Light tends to precede heavy I gave my sixteen great-grand-nieces in California a call.  I gave a call to my sixteen…. 

Research Question 

Does priming also occur BETWEEN speakers? (not just within the same speaker)

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Bears on two larger questions 

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What kinds of representations are used for language production and comprehension? I.e., do they share representations at some level? What are the mechanisms involved in the coordination of common ground? Do they require active consideration of your interlocutor’s needs?

--> Jesse Blake’s presentation

Discussion Questions 

When speakers co-ordinate their dialogue does the common ground change and accumulate utterance by utterance or does it remain constant throughout the conversation? (MR)

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They say that their findings have methodological implications. Is it possible that their use of confederate scripting and picture matching is the reason they got the surprising results they did? (Jessica DeSisto)

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The results indicate that the priming effect was stronger when the verb remained the same in the prime and target conditions. Might the priming effect have be altered had another part of speech (such as an adjective) been changed in the different conditions? (Beth Riina) With the verb-same condition, there seemed to be a greater effect. Could this be due to a slight recency effect of the phrasing? It seems to me that it might result in a small priming effect. (Anthony Shook)

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Would the same effects be observed in a signed language discourse? (Beth Riina)

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Is it possible that syntactic priming is something left over from the initial stages of language acquisition wherein children often repeat back what is said to them? Why or why not? (Nicole Dobrowolski)