Conceptualizing and Formulating in Sentence Production

The study of the psychological process of generating acoustic language utterances has to cover three aspects. First, there is the problem of content selection: how does the speaker decide which conceptual structures (thoughts, perceived events) he will convert into natural language utterances? Goldman (1974) calls this the what-to-say problem. The second aspect is syntactic form selection: mapping a conceptual structure into a string of morphemes or, rather, morphs. Actually, two issues are at stake here. One is form determination: which procedure carries out the conversion of conceptual structures into morpheme strings? The other is paraphrase selection. A conceptual structure usually can be phrased many ways; this raises the question of how the speaker chooses between alternative paraphrases. Third, morpheme strings are phonetically realized as sound sequences. These three aspects I will call the processes of conceptualizing, formulating, and speaking, respectively.