Language, Cognition and Neuroscience | 2019
Phonetic encoding in utterance production: a review of open issues from 1989 to 2018
Abstract
ABSTRACT Phonetic encoding refers to the mapping of an abstract linguistic code of the utterance into motor programmes which guide speech articulation. The encoding of speech gestures involves complex cognitive-motor planning, which has received limited attention in the psycholinguistic literature on language production relative to linguistic encoding processes. Here we will review some issues on phonetic encoding and the related empirical results by integrating evidence from psycholinguistic, phonetic, neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies from the last 30 years. In particular, we will focus on (i) the distinction between phonological and phonetic encoding, (ii) the nature and size of phonetic representations and (iii) the dynamics of phonetic encoding in the time-course of utterance planning. We will end up showing that the transformation of a linguistic code into motor programmes likely involves a larger proportion of the overall utterance planning time than acknowledged in current models and with many open questions for future research.