Grammatical Encoding for Speech Production

This Elements series presents theoretical and empirical studies in the interdisciplinary field of psycholinguistics. Topics include issues in the mental representation and processing of language in production and comprehension, and the relationship of psycholinguistics to other fields of research. Each Element is a high quality and up-to-date scholarly work in a compact, accessible format.Publisher PD

Mars Rising: Icons of Imperial Power

Political and news media imagery saturate the culture of our classrooms as thoroughly as the popular culture imagery that deliberately targets children and youth. Media images such as those of US president G. W. Bush\u27s visit to Canada that we discuss in this paper have become ubiquitous in our culture. In our view they constitute a primary mechanism through which the powerful political and economic forces exert an unrelenting threat on populations around the world. We (1 + 1 + 1)* enter this discussion from the point of view of Canadians, one of whom holds duel Canadian / US citizenship, all of whom have extensive backgrounds in the practice of our respective art forms and a broad range of academic study in the arts and media. We are well aware that mass-mediated images are not innocent happenstance. Our research revealed the degree to which every detail of the president\u27s media images had been envisioned, designed, and executed. To understand the images and how they contribute to the pervasive sense of insecurity within current social, political and economic realities, we are obliged to speak first to our reactions; we acknowledge and attempt to accurately foreground our own emotional and intellectual groundings. As we scrutinize the images and attend to their formal composition and content, we also articulate the qualities of these contemporary media images that we observe to be analogous to the composition and aesthetics of ancient religious icons. Simultaneously we recognize contemporary versions of historical, secular practices of recasting icons to accommodate the designs of Byzantine emperors and contemporary despots

Healthy Aging and Sentence Production:Disrupted Lexical Access in the Context of Intact Syntactic Planning

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Age-related effects on lexical, but not syntactic, processes during sentence production

ABSTRACT We investigated the effect of healthy ageing on the lexical and syntactic processes involved in sentence production. Young and older adults completed a semantic interference sentence production task: we manipulated whether the target picture and distractor word were semantically related or unrelated and whether they fell within the same phrase (“the watch and the clock/hippo move apart”) or different phrases (“the watch moves above the clock/hippo”). Both age groups were slower to initiate sentences containing a larger, compared to a smaller, initial phrase, indicating a similar phrasal scope of advanced planning. However, older adults displayed significantly larger semantic interference effects (slower to initiate sentences when the target picture and distractor word were related) than young adults, indicating an age-related increase in lexical competition. Thus, while syntactic planning is preserved with age, older speakers encounter problems managing the temporal co-activation of competing lexical items during sentence production.publishedVersio

Phonological precision for word recognition in skilled readers

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Effects of Speech Rate and Practice on the Allocation of Visual Attention in Multiple Object Naming

Earlier studies had shown that speakers naming several objects typically look at each object until they have retrieved the phonological form of its name and therefore look longer at objects with long names than at objects with shorter names. We examined whether this tight eye-to-speech coordination was maintained at different speech rates and after increasing amounts of practice. Participants named the same set of objects with monosyllabic or disyllabic names on up to 20 successive trials. In Experiment 1, they spoke as fast as they could, whereas in Experiment 2 they had to maintain a fixed moderate or faster speech rate. In both experiments, the durations of the gazes to the objects decreased with increasing speech rate, indicating that at higher speech rates, the speakers spent less time planning the object names. The eye–speech lag (the time interval between the shift of gaze away from an object and the onset of its name) was independent of the speech rate but became shorter with increasing practice. Consistent word length effects on the durations of the gazes to the objects and the eye-speech lags were only found in Experiment 2. The results indicate that shifts of eye gaze are often linked to the completion of phonological encoding, but that speakers can deviate from this default coordination of eye gaze and speech, for instance when the descriptive task is easy and they aim to speak fast

Evidence against preserved syntactic comprehension in healthy aging

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