The generation of words in speech involves a number of processing stages. There is, first, a stage of conceptual preparation; this is followed by stages of lexical selection, phonological encoding, phonetic encoding and articulation. In addition, the speaker monitors the output and, if necessary, self-corrects. Major parts of the theory have been computer modelled. The paper concentrates on experimental reaction time evidence in support of the theory.

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A theory of lexical access in speech production

Prologue PART 1: The Need for a Theory of Cognitive Evolution Mental Architecture as an Emergent Phenomenon Culture as Evidence for Cognitive Structure The Organization of This Book PART 2:

Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition

An overview of the basic ideas of articulatory phonology is presented, along with selected examples of phonological patterning for which the approach seems to provide a particularly insightful account. In articulatory phonology, the basic units of phonological contrast are gestures, which are also abstract characterizations of articulatory events, each with an intrinsic time or duration. Utterances are modeled as organized patterns (constellations) of gestures, in which gestural units may overlap in time. The phonological structures defined in this way provide a set of articulatorily based natural classes. Moreover, the patterns of overlapping organization can be used to specify important aspects of the phonological structure of particular languages, and to account, in a coherent and general way, for a variety of different types of phonological variation. Such variation includes allophonic variation and fluent speech alternations, as well as ‘coarticulation’ and speech errors. Finally, it is suggested that the gestural approach clarifies our understanding of phonological development, by positing that prelinguistic units of action are harnessed into (gestural) phonological structures through differentiation and coordination.

https://www.haskins.yale.edu/sr/SR111/SR111_03.pdf

Articulatory phonology: an overview.

Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. Bodies and persons 3. Perception and action 4. Concepts 5. Imagery, memory, and reasoning 6. Language and communication 7. Cognitive development 8. Emotion and consciousness 9. Conclusion.

Embodiment and Cognitive Science

Rev Soc Bras Fonoaudiol. 2007;12(4):343-5 (1) Pós-graduanda em Lingüística e Língua Portuguesa pela Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais – PUC-Minas – Belo Horizonte (MG), Brasil; Professora da Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais – PUCMinas – Belo Horizonte (MG), Brasil. Endereço para correspondência: Denise Brandão de Oliveira e Britto. R. Desembargador Jorge Fontana, 250/1201, bloco 1, Belvedere, Belo Horizonte – MG, CEP 30320-670. E-mail: denisebrandao@pucminas.br The faculty of language

/pdf/the-faculty-of-language-bev45glvla.pdf

The faculty of language

We have argued that dynamically defined articulatory gestures are the appropriate units to serve as the atoms of phonological representation. Gestures are a natural unit, not only because they involve task-oriented movements of the articulators, but because they arguably emerge as prelinguistic discrete units of action in infants. The use of gestures, rather than constellations of gestures as in Root nodes, as basic units of description makes it possible to characterise a variety of language patterns in which gestural organisation varies. Such patterns range from the misorderings of disordered speech through phonological rules involving gestural overlap and deletion to historical changes in which the overlap of gestures provides a crucial explanatory element.Gestures can participate in language patterns involving overlap because they are spatiotemporal in nature and therefore have internal duration. In addition, gestures differ from current theories of feature geometry by including the constriction degree as an inherent part of the gesture. Since the gestural constrictions occur in the vocal tract, which can be charactensed in terms of tube geometry, all the levels of the vocal tract will be constricted, leading to a constriction degree hierarchy. The values of the constriction degree at each higher level node in the hierarchy can be predicted on the basis of the percolation principles and tube geometry. In this way, the use of gestures as atoms can be reconciled with the use of Constriction degree at various levels in the vocal tract (or feature geometry) hierarchy.The phonological notation developed for the gestural approach might usefully be incorporated, in whole or in part, into other phonologies. Five components of the notation were discussed, all derived from the basic premise that gestures are the primitive phonological unit, organised into gestural scores. These components include (1) constriction degree as a subordinate of the articulator node and (2) stiffness (duration) as a subordinate of the articulator node. That is, both CD and duration are inherent to the gesture. The gestures are arranged in gestural scores using (3) articulatory tiers, with (4) the relevant geometry (articulatory, tube or feature) indicated to the left of the score and (5) structural information above the score, if desired. Association lines can also be used to indicate how the gestures are combined into phonological units. Thus, gestures can serve both as characterisations of articulatory movement data and as the atoms of phonological representation.

Articulatory gestures as phonological units

We propose an approach to phonological representation based on describing an utterance as an organised pattern of overlapping articulatory gestures. Because movement is inherent in our definition of gestures, these gestural ‘constellations’ can account for both spatial and temporal properties of speech in a relatively simple way. At the same time, taken as phonological representations, such gestural analyses offer many of the same advantages provided by recent nonlinear phonological theories, and we give examples of how gestural analyses simplify the description of such ‘complex segments’ as /s/–stop clusters and prenasalised stops. Thus, gestural structures can be seen as providing a principled link between phonological and physical description.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0952675700000658

Towards an articulatory phonology

https://www.haskins.yale.edu/sr/SR103/SR103_06.pdf

Gestural specification using dynamically-defined articulatory structures

Within the Articulatory Phonology framework, the notion of gestural structure plays a central role. The nature of such structures has been the focus of two related lines of recent research that we present here. One line involves a proposal to enrich gestural structures to include an explicit representation of the relative cohesiveness of pairs of gestures within an utterance. As it turns out, this simple addition to the model has unexpected and interesting explanatory consequences, one of which involves the phonetic and phonological properties of syllable structure. The second line involves developing a research strategy to account for the observed properties that gestural structures exhibit in languages using principles of self-organization.

Catherine P. Browman

Papers

Articulatory phonology: an overview.

Articulatory gestures as phonological units

Towards an articulatory phonology

Gestural specification using dynamically-defined articulatory structures

Competing constraints on intergestural coordination and self-organization of phonological structures