The Timing of Lexical Memory Retrievals in Language Production

Jeremy Cole, David Reitter


Abstract
This paper explores the time course of lexical memory retrieval by modeling fluent language production. The duration of retrievals is predicted using the ACT-R cognitive architecture. In a large-scale observational study of a spoken corpus, we find that language production at a time point preceding a word is sped up or slowed down depending on activation of that word. This computational analysis has consequences for the theoretical model of language production. The results point to interference between lexical and phonological stages as well as a quantifiable buffer for lexical information that opens up the possibility of non-sequential retrievals.
Anthology ID:
N18-1183
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2017–2027
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1183
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1183
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jeremy Cole and David Reitter. 2018. The Timing of Lexical Memory Retrievals in Language Production. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 2017–2027, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Timing of Lexical Memory Retrievals in Language Production (Cole & Reitter, NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1183.pdf