Psycholinguistic research has shown that the influence of abstract syntactic knowledge on performance is shaped by particular sentences that have been experienced. To explore this idea, the authors applied a connectionist model of sentence production to the development and use of abstract syntax. The model makes use of (a) error-based learning to acquire and adapt sequencing mechanisms and (b) meaning–form mappings to derive syntactic representations. The model is able to account for most of what is known about structural priming in adult speakers, as well as key findings in preferential looking and elicited production studies of language acquisition. The model suggests how abstract knowledge and concrete experience are balanced in the development and use of syntax.

. This paper describes a neural model of speech production and perception-production interactions. This model has been developed to account for a wide variety of experimental data, ranging from kinematic analyses of articulator movements to functional imaging studies of the human brain. We have also tested predictions based on the model with these and other experimental techniques. Hypothesized neural correlates of the models components have been identified to facilitate testing of model predictions with techniques such as fMRI. The model also serves as a framework for interpreting and organizing the accumulating mass of data from functional imaging studies of the human brain. 1.

output lexicon

Abstract. This paper describes a neural model of speech production and perception-production interactions. This model has been developed to account for a wide variety of experimental data, ranging from kinematic analyses of articulator movements to functional imaging studies of the human brain. Hypothesized neural correlates of the model’s components have been identified to facilitate testing of model predictions with techniques such as fMRI. The model also serves as a framework for interpreting and organizing the accumulating mass of data from functional imaging studies of the human brain. According to the model, the goals of speech movements are in auditory-temporal space and the movements are planned with the use of mappings between articulations and their acoustic and auditory consequences. It is hypothesized that the mappings are acquired and maintained with the use of auditory feedback. Data are presented from studies of changes in speech that occur in response to a change in hearing status. These data provide information about the nature of the mappings and how they are used in planning speech movements. 1. The DIVA Model of Speech Production The overall objective of our research is to model the brain activity and the motor, biomechanical and sensory processes involved in speech production. Our approach is to use a combination of computational models and to develop and test them with brain imaging, psychophysical, physiological, anatomical and acoustic data. In particular, we have developed a neural network model of speech motor skill acquisition and speech production, called the DIVA model, that explains a wide range of data on contextual variability, motor equivalence,

A series of experiments investigated whether naming latencies for homophones (e.g., /nn/) are a function of specific-word frequency (i.e., the frequency of nun) or a function of cumulativehomophone frequency (i.e., the sum of the frequencies of nun and none). Specific-word but not cumulative-homophone frequency affected picture-naming latencies. This result was obtained in two languages (English and Chinese). An analogous finding was obtained in a translation task, where bilingual speakers produced the English names of visually presented Spanish words. Control experiments ruled out that these results are an artifact of orthographic or articulatory factors, or of visual recognition. The results argue against the hypothesis that homophones share a common word-form representation, and support instead a model in which homophones have fully independent representations. 3 Homophones are words that have the same pronunciation but differ in meaning, spelling, or grammatical class. How are homophones represented and accessed in speech production? Two hypotheses have been proposed. One view holds that homophones share a common lexicalphonological representation, but because they have different meanings and often also different grammatical properties (e.g., sun/son; the watch/to watch; him/hymn), they have different semantic and lexical-grammatical representations (Cutting & Ferreira, 1999; Dell, 1990; Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999) 1 . We will call models of this type shared representation (SR) models. There are four levels of representation in these models: semantic/conceptual nodes, lemma nodes, lexeme nodes, and phonological nodes. Lemmas specify the words grammatical properties, while lexemes specify their phonological contents. Figure 1a sche...

The study investigated the neuronal basis of the retrieval of words from the mental lexicon. The semantic category interference effect was used to locate lexical retrieval processes in time and space. This effect reflects the finding that, for overt naming, volunteers are slower when naming pictures out of a sequence of items from the same semantic category than from different categories. Participants named pictures blockwise either in the context of same- or mixedcategory items while the brain response was registered using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Fifteen out of 20 participants showed longer response latencies in the same-category compared to the mixed-category condition. Event-related MEG signals for the participants demonstrating the interference effect were submitted to a current source density (CSD) analysis. As a new approach, a principal component analysis was applied to decompose the grand average CSD distribution into spatial subcomponents (factors). The spatial factor indicating left temporal activity revealed significantly different activation for the same-category compared to the mixedcategory condition in the time window between 150 and 225 msec post picture onset. These findings indicate a major involvement of the left temporal cortex in the semantic interference effect. As this effect has been shown to take place at the level of lexical selection, the data suggest that the left temporal cortex supports processes of lexical retrieval during production. &

We investigated the processes of lexical retrieval during the production of adjectival noun phrases (NPs) such as "the blue kite". We used various current assumptions about the scope of grammatical and phonological encoding and about the locus of the classic frequency effect to derive predictions about possible frequency effects in the NP naming task. The predictions were tested in two picturenaming experiments where we manipulated orthogonally the frequencies of the adjective and of the noun that composed the NPs. We consistently found frequency effects for both adjectives and nouns. Moreover the effects were additive. We argue that the existence of a frequency effect for the noun during noun phrase production restricts the various combinations of assumptions that speech production models can hold simultaneously. Possible implications of the additivity of the effects for the time course of lexical access are also discussed.

Abstract The present experiment explores the time course of Chinese lexical access in speech production. The experiment applies classical picture-word interference paradigm. The picture paired with different interfering stimulus (SEMANTIC, PHONOLOGICAL, UNRELATED and NEUTRAL) in different SOA (stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA). The results show that SOA and interfering condition affect the picture naming significantly. The interaction between SOA and interfering condition was also significant. The finding indicates that at SOA = 0 ms and 150 ms both semantic and phonological activation exist. Thus there is a stage of lexical access to a content word where its meaning and word-form are activated. The result provides evidence for the connectionist model from reaction time analysis. The time course of Chinese lexical access may different from the western language.

A neural model of speech production and its application to studies of the role of auditory feedback in speech

This study explored access to grammatical gender during naming in Hebrew. Studies of anomia and tip-of-the-tongue states (TOT) found that speakers of various languages (Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch) have information about the grammatical gender of words they fail to retrieve. In Hebrew, on the other hand, a TOT study found that Hebrew speakers could not provide gender information. To test access to gender in single words in Hebrew we used an implicit measure -- the analysis of paraphasias of anomic patients with respect to whether or not they preserved the grammatical gender of the target word. The rationale behind this measure was that when a paraphasia is created, it generally conforms to the partial knowledge the speaker has on the target word. If speakers have gender knowledge when they fail to name, they should produce paraphasias that match their partial information, and thus match the gender of the target. Such gender preservation in paraphasias was found in German for individuals with anomia, and in Arabic, French and German for slips-of-thetongue.