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Planning and timing in sentence production: The syntax-to-phonology conversion
Abstract
The fundamental question to be answered in this dissertation is, What sort of structure controls the timing of an utterance during sentence production? Timing here refers to the ordering of elements (i.e., words) within an utterance, and the specification of the duration of each element and any pauses. The structure which controls timing is thus a plan or motor program for some segment of speech. The experimental paradigm used in this dissertation is a sentence repetition task in which subjects either read sentences aloud or repeat sentences temporarily held in a short-term memory buffer. Various measures such as word and pause duration as well as initiation time (time to begin saying an utterance) were examined. The first experiment demonstrates that a syntactic structure does not have the necessary properties to control utterance timing, contrary to claims made by Cooper and Paccia-Cooper (1980). Instead, it is necessary to posit a phonological level of representation constructed from the syntactic structure; it is a phonological structure which guides utterance timing. However, the first experiment also demonstrates that a phonological structure with the properties ascribed to it by Gee and Grosjean (1983) does not have the right properties to account for timing either. I present an alternative view of phonological structure, and a model of the way in which it is created from a syntactic structure. The most important characteristic of the model is that it separates planning-based acoustic effects from more rhythmically determined ones (timing-based effects). Creation of the phonological structure produces the planning effects; execution of the structure produces the rhythmic ones. The phonological structure has the characteristics of a metrical grid: Information concerning timing relations within an utterance are specified in a way that abstracts from the actual segmental content of the utterance.
Subject Area
Psychology|Experiments
Recommended Citation
Ferreira, Maria Fernanda, "Planning and timing in sentence production: The syntax-to-phonology conversion" (1988). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI8813216.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI8813216