RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE PRODUCTION AND COMPREHENSION

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Relationship between production and comprehension were often invoked as cause of language change. Many Scholars have often observed that relationship between comprehension and production are affected by adoption to learning. Deli and Chang (2013) suggests that language comprehension involves predication using production system. Therefore this being said, it may be logical for one to assert that language production (Speech) and language comprehension are complementary .Hence the thrust of this essay is to assess the grounds to which language production and comprehension rely on each other paying attention also to both strengths and weaknesses.

To commence, McCarley and Christianson (2011) suggests that language production and comprehension are a single system. Basing on the notion that syntactic knowledge accumulates through abstraction over multi-word sequences and words are chunked based on transitional probabilities as incoming utterances are processed. Hence the distributional information of the chunks employed during production is used to predict upcoming language input during comprehension. A study conducted on language learning in adults, specifically the way comprehension and production affects each other by Kittedge and Dell (2016) in which they examined whether experiencing the same or an opposing constraint in other persons speech can affect the participants speech output. They found that the nature of the constraint in the speech input only mattered when participants sub-vocally produced the other person’s utterances, or when they monitored the utterances for errors. There was no transfer of learning when participants listened to the speech input and monitored for the occurrence of certain phonemes (Meyer, Huettig&Levelt 2016). The authors propose that the representations involved in production and comprehension are separate, but that some comprehension tasks (e.g., monitoring for errors) activate the production system. When this happens, transfer occurs from comprehension to production.

In addition, as indicated by Meyer, Huettig & Jevelt (2016) relations between production and comprehension were often invoked as causes of language change. Bredsdorff(1821,1886) mentioned mishearing, misunderstanding, or mis-recollection of sounds as potential causes of sound change in the speaker. Also indolence of the speaker would affect articulation and hence the sound patterns perceived by the listener, a view with which others, in particularWundt (1900), concurred. An important nineteenth century theory invoking the interaction of production and perception of speech was Wernicke’s (1874) theory of self-monitoring in speech. During speech, the sensory speech center is actively involved in controlling whether the spoken words match stored sound images. When the system breaks down, as in conduction aphasia, par aphasias will occur.  Therefore Lee’s (1950) discovery of the delayed auditory feedback (DAF) effect which indicated that one’s speech delayed by some 150 ms, speech fluency dramatically breaks down. Based on these observations, Lee designed an engineering model of self-monitoring, which required feedback to take place within the syllable being spoken.Hence as alluded by Mclelland&Rumelhart (1981) cited in Eysenck and Keane(2010) language comprehension necessarily requires active cognitive processing and involvement. One might argue that the listener adjusts to language production through engagement and within the context comprehension is made as we retrieve the meaning of words from our memory, we may rely on their perceptual features and the function (as well as some other characteristics).

The cording hypothesis by (Mehler 1936) articulates that when one listens or memories a sentence decodes its surface from as deep structure plus transformations (such as negative and positive). Reproducing the sentence is going back from deep to surface structure. These are psychologically real linguistic structures identical for comprehension and production (Meyer, Huettig&Levelt, 2016). The complexity of mapping surface structures onto deep structure or inversely a function of the number of transformations involved. A declarative sentence is easier to produce and understood than a passive one which is harder .Hence transformations are psychologically real in both comprehension and production. In one stage speech sounds are analyzed into their components. In another stage these components are analyzed for patterns and matched to a prototype or template ( Kuhl, 1991; Massaro, 1987; Stevens & Blumstein,1981). One theory of this kind is the phonetic refinement theory ( Pisoni& associates,1985)which articulates that we start with an analysis of auditory sensations and shift to higher level processing. Thus people identify words on the basis of successively paring downthe possibilities for matches between each of the phonemes and the words we alreadyknow from memory. In this theory, the initial sound that establishes the set of possible words one have heard need not be the first phoneme alone.For instance listening to a lecture when you heard only garbled sound, It takes you a few moments to figure out what the speaker must have said. Therefore to decide what you heard, you may have gone through a conscious process of phonetic refinement. A similar theoretical idea is embodied by the TRACE model ( McClelland& Elman, 1986). According to this model, speech perception begins with three levels of feature detection: the level of acoustic features, the level of phonemes, and the level of words. According to this theory, speech perception is highly interactive. Lower levels affect higher levels and vice versa.

AsLibernman (1957) cited in Sternberg and Sternerg (2012) it “speech is perceived by reference to articulation, thus tilling with Stetson (1951).Stevens (1960) proposed a schematic analysis by synthesis model of speech perception, in which the spectral representation auditory derived from the speech signal is converted into an articulatory description.Supported by the Bartlett’s schemas and reconstructive memory (1932).Bartlett believed that schemas (the building blocks of knowledge derived from previous experience were fundamental for language comprehension (Bartlett 1932 cited in Brown, 2007). A study conducted based on his storytelling of an Indian folk tale, ‘War of the Ghosts’, he found that people do not in fact recall information accurately but instead reconstruct language based on such expectations (‘effort after meaning’).  Hence accounts of the story were distorted in several ways by westerners, for example, omissions were made, there were changes of order, rationalization,alterations in importance and distortions of emotion Therefore it may be rational for one to assert that once schemas are established language production would be easy as inferences to the existing schema would be made.

.However, one attribute these theories have in common is that they all require decisionmaking processes above and beyond feature detection or template matching. Thus, the speech we perceive may differ from the speech sounds that actually reach our ears. The reason is that cognitive and contextual factors influence our perception of the sensed signal. For example, the phonemic-restoration effect involves integrating what we know with what we hear when we perceive speech ( Samuel, 1981; Warren, 1970; Warren & Warren, 1970). People may be able to understand language well but not produce it well or vice versa. The dissociation becomes particularly apparent in the case of second language. For example, many people around the world can understand substantial amounts of English without being able to read or write it adequately.

Perhaps more importantly, production and comprehension differ during acquisition, with children comprehending much that they cannot produce. However, this does not mean that children do not engage production processes during comprehension, but merely that they can have difficulty constructing all stages from intention to articulation. Additionally, much comprehension can be ‘shallow’, with children working out what is meant on the basis of surface cues (e.g. which word comes first). More interestingly, production data suggest that young children do not generalize abstract constructions to novel verbs (Temasello 2000) whereas comprehension data from preferential looking tasks suggest that they use abstract constructions to interpret utterances ( Fisher 2002). However, Chang et al. show that it is possible to reconcile these data in an account in which syntactic abstractions that support production arise from learners’ predictions about upcoming words during comprehension (Chang 2006)Thus, prediction might have a central role in learning as well as in comprehension. 

In summary, we propose that the production system can be used to facilitate language comprehension, just as the motor system can be used during perception. On the one hand, comprehenders predict upcoming words, grammatical categories and meanings, and the data are straight forwardly explained through the involvement of the production system. On the other hand, people imitate what they have just heard at various linguistic levels. We have argued that they also covertly imitate and that such imitation enables the production system to make predictions, which in turn facilitate comprehension. 

Reference

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