Projects at the Language Production Lab

Please see the Publications page for a more complete list of papers, sorted by year and categorized by project.

Structural priming is a tendency to recreate a recently uttered syntactic structure in different words. It can be seen even when words and thematic roles change from one utterance to another. We are exploring an explanation of this kind of priming in terms of implicit learning, using experimental methods and computational models in our work.

• Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 355-387.
• Bock, J. K. (1989). Closed-class immanence in sentence production. Cognition , 31, 163-186.
• Bock, J. K., & Kroch, A. S. (1989). The isolability of syntactic processing. In G. N. Carlson, & M. K. Tanenhaus (Ed.), Linguistic structure in language processing (pp. 157-196). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
• Bock, J. K. (1990). Structure in language: Creating form in talk. American Psychologist, 45, 1221-1236.
• Bock, J. K., & Loebell, H. (1990). Framing sentences. Cognition, 35, 1-39.
• Bock, J. K., Loebell, H. , & Morey, R. (1992). From conceptual roles to structural relations: Bridging the syntactic cleft. Psychological Review, 99, 150-171.
• Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 177-192.
• Chang, F., Dell, G. S., Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). Structural priming as implicit learning: A comparison of models of sentence production. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29, 217-229.
• Chang, F., Bock, J. K., & Goldberg, A. E. (2003). Can thematic roles leave traces of their places? Cognition, 90, 29-49.
• Loebell, H., & Bock, J. K. (2003). Structural priming across languages. Linguistics, 41, 791-824.

Agreement is a paradigm case of what syntax does. Relying on features like number and gender, agreement ties together different words (e.g., verbs and their subjects; pronouns and their antecedents) that reflect the same thought. We are developing an account of how agreement is implemented in spontaneous speech. The primary goals are to explain normal agreement and agreement errors within a uniform framework, to explain differences in the agreement properties of verbs and pronouns, and to explain cross-language and cross-dialect differences in how agreement works.

• Bock, J. K., & Miller, C. A. (1991). Broken agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 45-93.
• Bock, J. K., & Cutting, J. C. (1992). Regulating mental energy: Performance units in language production. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 99-127.
• Bock, J. K., & Eberhard, K. M. (1993). Meaning, sound, and syntax in English number agreement. Language and Cognitive Processes, 8, 57-99.
• Bock, J. K. (1995). Producing agreement. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8, 56-61.
• Bock, K., Nicol, J., & Cutting, J. C. (1999). The ties that bind: Creating number agreement in speech. Journal of Memory and Language, 40, 330-346.
• Meyer, A. S., & Bock, J. K. (1999). Representations and processes in the production of pronouns: Some perspectives from Dutch. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 281-301.
• Pearlmutter, N. J., Garnsey, S. M., & Bock, J. K. (1999). Agreement processes in sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 427-456.
• Bock, J. K., Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., Meyer, A. S., & Schriefers, H. (2001). Some attractions of verb agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 43, 83-128.
• Bock, J. K. & Levelt, W. J. M. (2002). Language production: Grammatical encoding. In G. T. M. Altmann (Ed.), Psycholinguistics: Critical concepts in psychology (Vol. 5, pp. 405-452). London, Routledge. [Reprinted from the Handbook of Psycholinguistics, 1994]
• Hartsuiker, R. J., Schriefers, H. J., Bock, J. K., & Kikstra, G. M. (2003). Morphophonological influences on the construction of subject-verb agreement. Memory & Cognition, 31, 1316-1326.
• Bock, J. K. (2004). Psycholinguistically speaking: Some matters of meaning, marking, and morphing. In B. H. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 44, pp. 109-144). San Diego, CA: Elsevier.
• Bock, J. K., Eberhard, K. M., & Cutting, J. C. (in press). Producing number agreement: How pronouns equal verbs. Journal of Memory and Language.
• Bock, J. K., Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., Meyer, A. S., & Schriefers, H. (in press). Some attractions of verb agreement. Cognitive Psychology.
• Humphreys, K. R., & Bock, J. K. (in press). Notional number agreement in English. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

The mental lexicon is the repository of much of what speakers know about their language, and a lot of our work is concerned directly or indirectly with how the lexicon is accessed and used for relating meanings to sounds in language production. Here we list a small sample of papers relating to topics of interest in this area.

• Meyer, A. S., & Bock, J. K. (1992). The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: Blocking or partial activation? Memory & Cognition, 20, 715-726.
• Ferreira, V. S. (1996). Is it better to give than to donate? Syntactic flexibility in language production. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 724-755.
• Cutting, J. C., & Bock, J. K. (1997). That's the way the cookie bounces: Syntactic and semantic components of experimentally elicited idiom blends. Memory & Cognition, 25, 57-71.
• Griffin, Z. M., & Bock, J. K. (1998). Constraint, word frequency, and the relationship between lexical processing levels in spoken word production. Journal of Memory and Language, 38, 313-338.
• Griffin, Z. M. (1999). Frequency of meaning-use for ambiguous and unambiguous words. Behavior Research Instruments, Methods, and Computers, 31, 520-530.
• Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). Producing words: How mind meets mouth. In L. Wheeldon (Ed.), Aspects of anguage production (pp. 7-47). Hove, England: Psychology Press.
• Ferreira, V.S., & Dell, G.S. (2000). The effect of ambiguity and lexical availability on syntactic and lexical production. Cognitive Psychology, 40, 296-340
• Peterson, R.R., Burgess, C., Dell, G.S., & Eberhard, K. (2001). Dissociation between syntactic and semantic processing during idiom comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 27, 1223-1237.
• Dell, G.S., & Gordon, J.K. (2003). Neighbors in the lexicon: Friends or foes? In N.O. Schiller and A.S. Meyer (Eds.), Phonetics and phonology in language comprehension and production: Differences and similarities. New York: Mouton.
• Dell, G.S., & Sullivan, J.M. (2004). Speech errors and language production: Neuropsychological and connectionist perspectives. In B.H. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (pp. 63-108). San Diego: Elsevier.
• Dell, G.S. (in press). Language production, lexical access, and aphasia. In G. Houghton (Ed.), Connectionist modeling in cognitive psychology. Hove, U.K.: Psychology Press.

Psycholinguistic interest in language production has often been stymied by the difficulty of getting access to the input to production processes. To begin to attack this problem, we are examining the relationship between eye movements over scenes and the features of language used to convey information about the scenes.

• Griffin, Z. M., & Bock, J. K. (2000). What the eyes say about speaking. Psychological Science, 11, 274-279.
• Bock, J. K., Irwin, D. E., Davidson, D. J., & Levelt, W. J. M. (2003). Minding the clock. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 653-685.
• Davidson, D. J., Bock, J. K., & Irwin, D. E. (in press). Tick talk. Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society 2003.
• Bock, J. K., Irwin, D. E., & Davidson, D. J. (in press). Putting first things first. In J. M. Henderson & F. Ferreira (Eds.), The integration of language, vision, and action: Eye movements and the visual world. New York: Psychology Press.

To produce a word, one must retrieve its pronunication from the mental lexicon and adjust that pronunication so that it fits its context. This process of retrieval and adjustment of speech sounds during production is phonological encoding. We study phonological encoding by analyzing everyday speech errors, by carrying out psycholinguistic experiments, and by developing connectionist models that mimic the findings of the analyses and experiments.

• Dell, G. S., Juliano, C., & Govindjee, A. (1993) Structure and content in language production: A theory of frame constraints in phonological speech errors. Cognitive Science, 17, 149--195.
• Govindjee, A., & Dell, G.S. (1994). Structure and content in word production: Why it's hard to say "dlorm". In M. Mozer et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 1993 Connectionist Models Summer School, 105-112. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Sevald, C.A., & Dell, G.S. (1994). The sequential cuing effect in speech production. Cognition, 53, 91-127.
• Sevald, C.A., Dell, G.S., & Cole, J. (1995). Syllable structure in speech production: Are syllables chunks or schemas? Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 807-820.
• Dell, G.S., & Juliano, C. (1996). Phonological encoding. In T. Dijkstra & K. DeSmedt (Eds.), Computational psycholinguistics: Symbolic and connectionist models of language processing. London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf.
• Gupta, P., & Dell, G.S. (1999). The emergence of language from serial order and procedural memory. In B. MacWhinney (Ed.), Emergentist approaches to language. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Dell, G.S. (2000). Lexical representation, counting, and connectionism: A commentary. In M. Broe & J. Pierrehumbert (Eds.), Papers in Laboratory Phonology V. Cambridge University Press.
• Dell, G.S., Reed, K.D., Adams, D.R., & Meyer, A.S. (2000). Speech errors, phonotactic constraints, and implicit learning: A study of the role of experience in language production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 26, 1355-1367.
• Guest, D.J., Dell, G.S., & Cole, J.S. (2000). Violable constraints in language production: Testing the transitivity assumption of Optimality Theory. ournal of Memory and Language, 42, 272-299.
• Dell, G.S., Harris, H., & Guest, D.J. (2001). Erreurs de production, contraintes phonotactiques, et experience recente (Speech errors, phonotactic constraints, and recent experience). Psychologie Francaise, 46, 55-65.
• Chen, J.Y., Chen, T.M., & Dell, G.S. (2002). Word-form encoding in Mandarin Chinese as assessed by the implicit priming task. Journal of Memory and Language, 46, 751-781.
• Chen, J.-Y., & Dell, G.S. (in press).Word-form encoding in Chinese speech production. In Li et al. (Eds.). Handbook of east asian psycholinguistics: Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  
• Chen, T.-M., Dell, G.S., & Chen, J.-Y. (in press). A cross-linguistic study of phonological units: Syllables emerge from the statistics of Mandarin Chinese, but not from the statistics of English. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 2004.
• Dell, G.S., & Kim, A. E. (in press). Speech errors and word-form encoding. In R. J. Hartsuiker et al.(Eds.), Phonological encoding and monitoring in normal and pathological speech.

• Aphasia Modeling Project (WebFit)
• Schwartz, M.F., Saffran, E.M., Bloch, D.E., & Dell, G.S. (1994). Disordered speech production in aphasic and normal speakers. Brain and Language, 47, 52-88.
• Dell, G.S., Schwartz, M.F., Martin, N., Saffran, E.M., & Gagnon, D.A. (1997). Lexical access in aphasic and nonaphasic speakers. Psychological Review, 104, 801-838.
• Gagnon, D.A., Schwartz, M.F., Martin, N., Dell, G.S., & Saffran, E.M. (1997). Origins of form-related paraphasias in aphasic naming. Brain and Language, 59, 450-472.
• Dell, G.S., Schwartz, M.F., Martin, N., Saffran, E.M., & Gagnon, D.A. (2000). The role of computational models in the cognitive neuropsychology of language: Reply to Ruml and Caramazza. Psychological Review, 107, 635-645.
• Foygel, D., & Dell, G.S. (2000). Models of impaired lexical access in speech production. Journal of Memory and Language, 43, 182-216.
• Martin, N., Saffran, E.M., Dell,G.S., Schwartz, M.F., & Gupta, P. (2000). Neuropsychological and computational evidence for a model of lexical processing, verbal short-term memory and learning. Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Beijing.
• Saffran, E.M., Dell, G.S., & Schwartz, M.F. (2000). Computational models of language disorders. In M.S. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The cognitive neurosciences, 2nd edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Gordon, J.K. & Dell, G.S. (2001). Phonological neighborhood effects: Evidence from aphasia and connectionist models. Brain and Language, 79, 21-23.
• Gordon, J.K., & Dell, G.S. (2002). Learning to divide the labor between syntax and semantics: A connectionist account of deficits in verb production. Brain and Cognition. 48-376-381.
• Gordon, J.K., & Dell, G.S. (2003). Learning to divide the labor: An account of deficits in light and heavy verb production. Cognitive Science, 27, 1-40.
• Dell, G.S. (2004). Connectionism and cognitive neuropsychology: Comments on Harley’Äôs Reflections. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 21, 27-30.
• Dell, G.S., Lawler, E.N., Harris, H.D., & Gordon, J.K. (2004). Models of errors of omission in aphasic naming. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 21, 125-145.
• Hanley, J. R., Dell, G.S., Kay, J., & Baron, R. (2004) Evidence for the involvement of a nonlexical route in the repetition of familiar words: A comparison of single and dual route models of auditory repetition. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 21, 147-158.

• McDonald, J. L., Bock, J. K., & Kelly, M. H. (1993). Word and world order: Semantic, phonological, and metrical determinants of serial position. Cognitive Psychology, 25, 188-230.
• Bock, J. K., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1994). Language production: Grammatical encoding. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics, 945-984. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
• Dell, G.S., & O'Seaghdha, P.G. (1994). Inhibition in interactive activation models of linguistic selection and sequencing. In D. Dagenbach & T. H. Carr (Eds.), Inhibitory processes in attention, memory, and language. San Diego: Academic Press.
• Bock, J. K. (1995). Sentence production: From mind to mouth. In J. Miller & P. Eimas (Eds.) Handbook of perception and cognition Vol. 11: Speech, language, and communication, 181-216. Academic Press.
• Dell, G.S. (1995). Speaking and misspeaking. In L. Gleitman & M. Liberman (Eds.), Invitation to Cognitive Science, Part I, Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Bock, J. K. (1996). Language production: Methods and methodologies. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 3, 395-421.
• Dell, G.S., Burger, L.K., & Svec, W.R. (1997). Language production and serial order: A functional analysis and a model. Psychological Review, 104, 123-147.
• Bock, J. K., & Garnsey, S. M. (1998). Language processing. In W. Bechtel & G. Graham (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Cognitive Science, 226-234. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
• Bock, J. K. (1999) Language production. In R. Wilson and F. C. Keil (Eds.), MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, 453-456. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Bock, J. K., & Huitema, J. (1999). Language production. In S. Garrod & M. Pickering (Eds.), Language processing, 365-388. Hove, England: Psychology Press.
• Cutting, J.C., & Ferreira, V.S. (1999). Semantic and phonological information in the production lexicon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25, 318-344.
• Dell, G.S., Chang, F., & Griffin, Z.M. (1999). Connectionist models of language production: Lexical access and grammatical encoding. Cognitive Science, 23, 517-542.
• Dell, G.S., Ferreira, V.S., & Bock, K. (1999). Binding, attention, and exchanges. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (commentary), 22, 41-42.
• Ferreira, V. S. & Cutting, J. C. (1999). Ninety-three pictures and 108 questions for the elicitation of homophones. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 29, 619-635.
• Griffin, Z. M., & Huitema, J. (1999). Beckman Spoken Picture Naming Norms.

Last modified: July 2004