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Phonetic Encoding in Utterance Production: a Review of Open Issues from 1989 to 2018

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Phonetic Encoding in Utterance Production: a Review of Open Issues from 1989 to 2018 Language, Cognition and Neuroscience ISSN: 2327-3798 (Print) 2327-3801 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/plcp21 Phonetic encoding in utterance production: a review of open issues from 1989 to 2018 Marina Laganaro To cite this article: Marina Laganaro (2019) Phonetic encoding in utterance production: a review of open issues from 1989 to 2018, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 34:9, 1193-1201, DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2019.1599128 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2019.1599128 Published online: 01 Apr 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 349 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 5 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=plcp21 LANGUAGE, COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE 2019, VOL. 34, NO. 9, 1193–1201 https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2019.1599128 REVIEW ARTICLE Phonetic encoding in utterance production: a review of open issues from 1989 to 2018 Marina Laganaro Faculty of Psychology and Educational Science, University of Geneva ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Phonetic encoding refers to the mapping of an abstract linguistic code of the utterance into motor Received 15 October 2018 programmes which guide speech articulation. The encoding of speech gestures involves complex Accepted 14 March 2019 cognitive-motor planning, which has received limited attention in the psycholinguistic literature on KEYWORDS language production relative to linguistic encoding processes. Here we will review some issues on Phonetic encoding; phonetic encoding and the related empirical results by integrating evidence from psycholinguistic, phonological; syllable; motor phonetic, neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies from the last 30 years. In particular, we will speech; time-course focus on (i) the distinction between phonological and phonetic encoding, (ii) the nature and size of phonetic representations and (iii) the dynamics of phonetic encoding in the time-course of utterance planning. We will end up showing that the transformation of a linguistic code into motor programmes likely involves a larger proportion of the overall utterance planning time than acknowledged in current models and with many open questions for future research. Introduction planning of an abstract linguistic code. In the 1999 model (Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999, hereafter In order to produce an utterance, a speaker has to select “LRM1999”), two distinct systems are clearly identified: the appropriate words, morphemes and syntactic struc- a linguistic encoding system, involving several core pro- ture and to plan and execute the combination of articu- cessing stages (conceptual preparation, lexical selection, latory gestures giving rise to an auditory signal, which morphological and phonological encoding) and a will be perceived and interpreted by the listener. Plan- second system involving a processor named phonetic ning at the lexical and morpho-syntactic levels corre- encoding, which “encodes the selected word in its sponds to the linguistic preparation of the message, context as a motor program” (LRM1999). The cognitive- while programming the articulatory gestures is a motor motor processor transforming an abstract linguistic task. The transformation of an abstract linguistic code code into articulatory movements represents however into motor programmes hence refers to the cognitive- a complex task involving the planning of (invariant) motor interface processor in the utterance planning, speech gestures, but also their adaptation to the actual which is called phonetic encoding1 or encoding of “pho- speech context and the control of the motor commands. netic plans” (Levelt, 1989) in the psycholinguistic litera- In the following we will review some key issues on ture, but has been referred to in multiple other ways in motor speech planning as they have been addressed in the motor speech literature (e.g. “speech motor plan- the psycholinguistic literature since Levelt’s 1989 book. ning”, Van der Merwe, 2008; “higher order speech We will first address the arguments in favour or against motor control”, Brendel et al., 2010; “planning frame the distinction made in some models between the encod- with speech sound maps”, Guenther, 2002, Guenther, ing of an abstract (phonological) utterance form and the Hampson, & Johnson, 2006). Hereafter we will use “pho- processing of phonetic plans. We will then turn to the netic encoding” to stick to the psycholinguistic literature, issue of the representation and size of phonetic plans or more broadly “motor speech planning”. and finally to the dynamics of phonetic planning in The psycholinguistic literature and models of relationship to the whole utterance planning process. language production describe multiple processes under- pinning utterance planning at different linguistic levels, The phonological-phonetic distinction while phonetic encoding usually refers to a single pro- cessing stage, giving an overall impression that motor In Levelt’s(1989) model of language production as well speech planning involves fewer computations than the as in further models (LRM1999), two distinct processes CONTACT Marina Laganaro [email protected] © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 1194 M. LAGANARO Figure 1. Illustration of a possible phonetic origin (A) and of the phonological origin (B) of phonetic errors (here “seal”-(si:l/- produced [si:l]).̬ h h underlie the preparation of the utterance form: planning pronounced [p ejl][stIn], not to [pejl][st In], Kenstowicz an abstract linguistic (phonological) form and encoding a & Kisseberth, 1979). Both observations, the involvement motor (phonetic) plan. Such a phonological-phonetic dis- of (well-formed) phonemes in speech errors and their tinction is not acknowledged in all models. Hickok (2014) contextual phonetic adaptation, favour the idea that seg- for instance proposes that language production does not mental exchanges occur between abstract, phonetically involve the encoding of abstract (phonological) utter- underspecified, segmental units. ance forms: in his proposal, the lexical-semantic system Experimental investigation of word form planning (the lemmas) is directly connected to motor pro- also brought evidence in favour of abstract phonological grammes. Other authors have also claimed that words units. For instance, Roelofs (1999) demonstrated using a are stored in memory along with their phonetic rep- form-preparation paradigm that phoneme overlap resentation rather than with abstract phonological between words speeds up the production of the target codes (Browman & Goldstein, 1989; Pierrehumbert, word, but that this is not the case for feature overlap, 2002). hence showing that phonemes seem to represent plan- The main argument in favour of abstract linguistic ning units. units involved in the planning of the utterance form Finally, a further argument favouring the phonologi- stems from the observation of speech errors, as they cal-phonetic distinction can be found in research with usually involve infra-lexical substitutions and exchanges left-hemisphere damaged speakers, where dissociations (phonological slips of the tongue, Fromkin, 1973). have been reported between patients producing Phoneme errors and in particular metatheses, i.e. errors mainly phonological errors, i.e. phoneme substitutions in which two phonemes exchange their position within and exchanges (in particular in conduction and Wernicke a word (“perfumes” produced “ferpumes”, Wilshire, 2002) aphasia, Blumstein, 1990; Kohn & Smith, 1990; Laganaro or between words (mait a winute), have been interpreted & Zimmermann, 2010) and patients with apraxia of as the miss-ordering of correctly encoded segments speech producing mainly phonetic errors (ill-formed, dis- (Dell, 1986; Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1979, 1992) and therefore torted phonemes, Blumstein, Cooper, Goodglass, Statle- argue in favour of a decomposed representation of nder, & Gottlieb, 1980; Darley, Aronson, & Brown, 1975). words relying on segmental units. Some further obser- In particular, a double dissociation between phonologi- vations related to speech errors contribute to suggesting cal and phonetic errors has been reported by Buchwald that the involved infra-lexical units are bound to be and Miozzo (2011), based on the acoustic analyses of abstract. First, it has long been argued that whole speech errors produced by two left-hemisphere (abstract, phonological) segments are involved in phono- damaged speakers. The authors analyzed the stop con- logical slips of the tongue produced by (heathy, unim- sonant following a word-initial /s/ deletion (e.g. [p] in paired) adult speakers, while sub-phonemic errors (ill- [pot] from /(s)pot/) in comparison to a word onset stop formed phonemes) or phonotactic violations are ([p] from /pot/) in two left-hemisphere damaged claimed to be extremely rare, at least in listener’s percep- English-speaking patients. In one patient the stop conso- tion (Meyer, 1992, see Aldarete and Topper, 2018 for nants following a deleted onset /s/ had the same acous- slightly larger proportions of phonotactic violations). tic properties as word onset aspirated stops, whereas in Second, the phonetic specifications of the segments the second patient stop-onsets due to deleted /s/ involved in metatheses adapt to their new phonological onsets were produced without the aspiration. Hence, context, as for instance the aspiration of initial plosives the acoustic
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