How language production shapes language form and comprehension

By Maryellen C. MacDonald. Frontiers in Psychology, 2012

543 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Language production processes can provide insight into how language comprehension works and language typology—why languages tend to have certain characteristics more often than others. Drawing on work in memory retrieval, motor planning, and serial order in action planning, the Production-Distribution-Comprehension (PDC) account links work in the fields of language production, typology, and comprehension: (1) faced with substantial computational burdens of planning and producing utterances, language producers implicitly follow three biases in utterance planning that promote word order choices that reduce these burdens, thereby improving production fluency. (2) These choices, repeated over many utterances and individuals, shape the distributions of utterance forms in language. The claim that language form stems in large degree from producers' attempts to mitigate utterance planning difficulty is contrasted with alternative accounts in which form is driven by language use more broadly, language acquisition processes, or producers' attempts to create language forms that are easily understood by comprehenders. (3) Language perceivers implicitly learn the statistical regularities in their linguistic input, and they use this prior experience to guide comprehension of subsequent language. In particular, they learn to predict the sequential structure of linguistic signals, based on the statistics of previously-encountered input. Thus, key aspects of comprehension behavior are tied to lexico-syntactic statistics in the language, which in turn derive from utterance planning biases promoting production of comparatively easy utterance forms over more difficult ones. This approach contrasts with classic theories in which comprehension behaviors are attributed to innate design features of the language comprehension system and associated working memory. The PDC instead links basic features of comprehension to a different source: production processes that shape language form.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ea00429a516758e971cabde8adfff621291cf309

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Citations in the corpus

Learning (not) to predict: Grammatical gender processing in second language acquisition (2016, background): “Across different frameworks, prediction has been argued to be a central component of language acquisition (e.g. Chang et al., 2006; Clark, 2013; Dell and Chang, 2014; MacDonald, 2013; Phillips and Ehrenhofer, 2015; Pickering and Garrod, 2013).”
The P-chain: relating sentence production and its disorders to comprehension and acquisition (2014, background): “MacDonald & Christiansen [49] showed that an SRN model could exhibit this difference.”
Robust speech perception: Recognize the familiar, generalize to the similar, and adapt to the novel (2015, background): “The current work thus contributes to a growing literature that considers language comprehension to be intimately tied to adaptation and implicit learning (see also Dell & Chang, 2014; Chang et al., 2006; Fine et al., 2013; Jaeger, 2013; Jaeger & Snider, 2013; MacDonald, 2013).”
Investigating locality effects and surprisal in written English syntactic choice phenomena. (2016, unknown): “Reflecting this observation, they adopt the labels production ease (MacDonald 2013) and communicative accounts, where the latter label avoids the implication that communicative aspects are solely for the benefit of the listener.”
Communicative efficiency in language production: Optional case-marking in Japanese (2015, background): “There are other production ease accounts that we will consider in the discussion (for a recent review, see MacDonald, 2013).”
Consequences of the Now-or-Never bottleneck for signed versus spoken languages (2015, background): “Thus, higher-level chunks tend to be passed down immediately to the level below as soon as they are “ready,” leading to a bias toward producing easy-to-retrieve utterance components before harder-to-retrieve ones (e.g., Bock 1982; MacDonald 2013).”
Neural signatures of syntactic variation in speech planning (2021, unknown): “This challenges theories that propose sentence production processes as the key drivers of language form and the distribution of variants in language use [84,85].”