Language Production in the Lab and in the Wild

Instructors: Laurel Brehm

The field of language production aims to understand how individual speakers plan and articulate sentences, words, and sounds. However, as is typical in all areas of psycholinguistics, much of the language production work since the 1980s has used lab-based experimental methods to try to tame the variability that speakers actually produce: in essence, lab-based paradigms are tightly controlled but often highly artificial. This course reflects on the insights obtained from language production paradigms such as syntactic priming, tongue-twisters, picture naming, picture-word interference, and common ground establishment, and compares these to the insights obtained from naturalistic observation of conversations, corpora, and other 'wild' data sources. In so doing, we reflect on what we really know as a field about the mechanisms and representations that allow us to produce language.

Keywords: Experimental Methods, Production, Productivity, Psycholinguistics, Corpus Linguistics

Instructors

Laurel Brehm

UC Santa Barbara

Laurel Brehm is an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara. She received training at the University of Illinois, Northwestern University, Penn State University, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. She got interested in language production from two formative experiences: meeting someone with aphasia for the first time, and observing the variations in number agreement used in British and American music magazines. Her research focuses on mistakes and variations in sentence and word production: how do we say what we mean, and what types of experience do we rely on to understand what someone else means? She and her lab use a wide variety of techniques including production elicitation paradigms, eye-tracking, memory errors, corpora, and computational/statistical modeling in order to study these questions.