Carel Van Wijk

A dual system for producing self-repairs in spontaneous speech: Evidence from experimentally elicited corrections ☆

This paper presents a cognitive theory on the production and shaping of selfrepairs during speaking. In an extensive experimental study, a new technique is tried out: artificial elicitation of self-repairs. The data clearly indicate that two mechanisms for computing the shape of self-repairs should be distinguished. One is based on the repair strategy called reformulation, the second one on lemmtr .substitution. W. Levelt’s (1983, Cognition, 14, 41- 104) well-formedness rule, which connects self-repairs to coordinate structures, is shown to apply only to reformulations. In case of lemma substitution, a totally different set of rules is at work. The linguistic unit of central importance in reformulations is the major syntactic constituent; in lemma substitutions it is a prosodic unit. the phonological phrase. A parametrization of the model yielded a very satisfactory fit between observed and reconstructed scores.

The PSY behind PHI: A psycholinguistic model for performance structures

Performance structures are hierarchical representations of sentences derived from experimental data. Gee and Grosjean (1983) have shown that a set of rules based on prosodic structure, the PHI algorithm, was capable of accounting for them almost perfectly. This paper presents a psycholinguistic model that relates linguistic descriptions of prosodic structure to the mental processes of sentence formulation. In addition, it is shown that the PHI algorithm can be replaced by a considerably simpler set of rules, the PSY algorithm, with a negligible loss of predictive power. We argue, finally, that this modification is needed for independent reasons too because PHI is at variance with linguistic analyses of prosodic structure.