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A Bilingual Production Model: Levelt's 'Speaking' Model Adapted

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Kees De Bot at University of Pannonia
Kees De Bot
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Abstract

In this article a description is given of a model of the bilingual speaker. The model presented is based on Levelt's (1989) 'Speaking' model, which sketches a framework in which a number of (highly autonomous) information processing components are postulated. The main characteristics of the model are that it is incremental and parallel, and that lower level processing is more automatized than higher level processing. An attempt is made to adapt the Levelt model for bilingual processing. Given the firm empirical basis of the (monolingual) version of the model, it was intended to change the model as little as possible. It is concluded that the first component, the conceptualize is probably partly language-specific and partly language-independent. Further it is hypothesized that there are different formulators for each language, while there is one lexicon where lexical elements from different languages are stored together. The output of the formulators is sent to the articulator which makes use of a large set of non-language specific speech motor plans. The adapted version of Levelt's model appears to provide a good explanation of various aspects of language production, especially with respect to codeswitching and the storage and retrieval of lexical elements, and it may suggest a useful direction to take in future research on language processing in bilinguals.
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BOT, KEES DE, A bilingual production model: Levelt's 'Speaking' model
adapted , Applied Linguistics, 13 (1992) p.1
... Following previous work on speech processing demands (Skehan 2009(Skehan , 2014, the current study adopts Kormos' (2006) L2 speech production model, which was developed based on L1 speech production models (e.g., Levelt 1989Levelt , 1999. As with other L2 speech production models (de Bot 1992;Segalowitz 2010), Kormos' model assumes that speech production proceeds in three major phases: Conceptualisation, Formulation, and Articulation. Conceptualisation is responsible for planning the content of speech, including the organisation of content of the message. ...
... From a theoretical perspective, speech production entails a range of information processing, such as lexical retrieval, and thus proceeds by consuming attentional resources (Baddeley 2003). Moreover, the attentional resources available for spontaneous L2 speech production are considered to be limited due to the partially automatized status of L2 skills (de Bot 1992;Kormos 2006;Skehan 2014). Accordingly, L2 speaking performance can be affected by how learners distribute their limited attentional resources to different phases of speech production (cf. ...
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... Producing utterances means converting the speakers' ideas into understandable spoken and written utterances (Burridge & Stebbins, 2020). The ideaexpression from the brain into the words and then utterances is known as language production (De Bot, 1992). This language production process is indicated by the presence of speech errors or slips of the tongue (Carrol, 2008), false start, lengthening, repetition, and pauses (Clark & Tree, 2002). ...
... Paolieri et al., 2010;Salamoura & Williams, 2007). Accordingly, most models postulate that a shared semantic system spreads activation to the lexical representations of both languages of a bilingual (Costa, 2005;Costa et al., 1999;De Bot, 1992;Green, 1986Green, , 1998Hermans et al., 1998;Poulisse & Bongaerts, 1994). ...
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... SLDs may emerge because of processing efforts to plan utterances when both languages are activated (Hoshino & Kroll, 2008). In bilingual speech processing, conceptual representations spread activation to the lexical representations of both languages (de Bot, 1992). As a result, monitoring, which has been claimed to result in disfluencies in monolingual speech (Levelt, 1989), requires additional cognitive resources, and disfluencies emerge more frequently because of the activation of two linguistic systems in terms of syntactic (Hartsuiker et al., 2004), lexical (de Bot, 1992, and/or sublexical (phonological) Note. ...
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Article
Full-text available
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