Language production

• Every week, each student reads a paper (or a couple of short ones) and one of the students presents the paper and leads in-class discussions.

• When: 12:15 - 13:45, Monday

• Where: C7 2 / Seminar room -1.05

• Prerequisites: None. First couple of classes introduce background knowledge.

• You MUST join the seminar Teams channel to be in this seminar. If you haven't, join it here.

• All course-related communications should be done via Teams, but in case of any problems in Teams, I am also available at nakamura@lst.uni-saarland.de.

When we speak, we have some ideas that we want to convey. We encode them into some linguistic form and output them as speech (or strings of letters) so that the comprehender can decode them and obtain the original ideas. How exactly does this happen? It must at least involve constructing the message, forming the syntactic structures and identifying lexical representations among many other processes. This course will explore those processes underlying language production. We will focus on semantic, syntactic, and lexical processing involved in language production. (On the other hand, we will not spend a lot of time on phonological processing and articulation.)

We will be asking following questions in this seminar:

• What kind of processing steps are involved in language production?

• How do we decide on what to say?

• How much do we plan ahead for language production?

• Each student is expected to attend, prepare, for and participate in every class. Please communicate in advance with me if you have to miss a class. If you cannot do so due to an emergency, please communicate it  as soon as you can.

• Turn in assignments on time and fully completed.

• Check Teams regularly and receive notifications for posts. I assume that you see a post or a message within 24 hours during weekdays.

• Ask for help!

• You can walk into my office at C7 1, Room 1.13 anytime during the office hours below. These are tentative slots and I will make an announcement on Teams if there is any change.

  • Fridays at 14-15

• All online communications from students or from instructors should be via Teams. You can also contact me at nakamura@lst.uni-saarland.de only if there is any issue using Teams.

I recognize the importance of a diverse student body, and we are committed to fostering inclusive and equitable classroom environments. I invite you, if you wish, to tell us how you want to be referred to in this class, both in terms of your name and your pronouns (he/him, she/her, they/them, etc.). Keep in mind that the pronouns someone uses are not necessarily indicative of their gender identity. Additionally, it is your choice whether to disclose how you identify in terms of your gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, and dis/ability, among all aspects of your identity (e.g., should it come up in classroom conversation about our experiences and perspectives) and should be self-identified, not presumed or imposed.  I will do my best to address and refer to all students accordingly, and I ask you to do the same for all of your fellows.

It is your responsibility to attend every course and to submit assignments in time. However, it does not apply if you have a decent excuse and if you communicate it in a timely manner. 

• You must report the issue that prevents attendance or timely submission as soon as you can after it happened. For example, if you were sick, ideally you should inform me about it right after you realized that you are sick, or when you feel better enough to send me a message about it at the latest. You cannot tell me a week after you got better that you had been sick and turn in your term paper late. It is always OK to tell me that you MIGHT not be able to submit an assignment in time due to illness and then end up making it before the deadline.

• If the problem is very sensitive and you prefer not to tell me about the details, that is OK. However, you have to at least tell me that a problem happened.

• Unexpected and unavoidable problems (e.g., sickness) would be considered as good excuses. On the other hand, issues such as assignments in other classes or planned travels would not count. You are responsible for managing your own schedules.

Overall structure

4 credits

40%: Presentation

40%: Reading responses

20%: Active participation in discussion

7 credits

50%: Paper

20%: Presentation

20%: Reading responses

10%: Active participation in discussion

See the evaluation guidelines for more details.

Final grades

Your grades for each work is added up and are converted into the final grades in the following way.

NOTE: These are tentative lists and would be updated in the coming couple of weeks. You are more than welcome to suggest a paper or a topic!

The PDF files of the papers can be found in the reading folder in the Materials channel.

Stages of language production

Content stream: Division of lemma (syntax) and lexeme (form)

Vigliocco et al. (1999), Schriefers et al. (1990), Strijkers et al. (2010)

Structure stream: Division of function ssignment vs structural assignment (constituency vs linearization)

Hartsuiker et al. (1999)

Division of Content vs Structure streams

Ferreira (1996)

Incrementality: How far do we plan?

Message

Brown-Schmidt & Konopka (2008)

Verb and arguments

Momma et al. (2016)

Choices of production

Topic / Givenness

Cowles & Ferreira (2012)