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Studies on bilingual production have not come to a consensus on the possibility of bilinguals reaching native-like production. Some studies find that bilinguals can be close to native production while others have shown that even in simultaneous bilinguals, the production cannot reach native-likeness. Flege’s Speech Learning Model (Flege & Bohn, 2020) theorizes that acquiring a second language affects the production of the L1 and vice versa. The model also states that new phonemes are easier to acquire compared to existing phonemes with different production. This thesis seeks to research the production of French and English vowels in a general population of Canadians to give an accurate picture of second language learning in Canada. We also seek to determine the strength of second language effects on the production of the first language and, what factors influence proficiency in bilingual speakers. Participants were recruited in the Montréal region to have bilinguals of different proficiency and different backgrounds. They were given a sentence list to read out loud while being recorded. The recorded data was used to study the vowel formants produced by the bilinguals. These formants were then used to create a plot of the group average that was then compared to the production plots of monolinguals. The production data was also used to create a group average distance, with the help of the Mahalanobis distance calculations, to also compare to the production from the French and English monolingual groups. The plots and the calculations were used to compare the groups between themselves and the monolingual groups. The results from the production data are within our expectations. The simultaneous bilinguals had the closest to native-like production in both English and French compared to the other bilinguals. The data also showed that for the English native bilinguals, the frequency of L2 use is the biggest factor in native-like production while for the French native bilinguals it was L2 proficiency. Regarding the SLM, the data we collected support the claim that bilinguals acquire and produce new phonemes with more ease than modify existing phonemes. It also partially supports the claim that knowledge of a second language will affect the production of the first language. The results from our experiment demonstrate that as the L1 French – L2 English bilinguals’ knowledge of English increased, their production of French veered away from the French monolinguals. However, this effect was not seen with the L1 English – L2 French bilinguals. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / The Speech Learning Model (SLM) theorizes that the acquisition of a second language will be affected by the production of the first/native language. In addition, it theorizes that the second language can simultaneously affect the first/native language (L1). By observing the production of French and English vowels in different groups of French native speakers who later acquire English (L2) and English native speakers who later acquire French, we hope to answer the following questions. 1. How close do bilinguals get to native-like production? 2. How strong is the bilateral (L1 → L2 and L2 → L1) effect in the different groups of bilinguals? 3. Which vowels are harder for bilinguals to acquire? 4. What factors influence native-like production? We recorded pronunciation of French and English vowels by bilinguals to achieve the goals of this thesis. By studying the pronunciation of vowels in English and French, we hoped to get a clearer picture of second language learner in the context of Canada. These pronunciations are used to compare the bilinguals to speakers who only speak French or English. The data suggests that bilinguals are the closest second language learner group to the pronunciation of both French and English vowels. The results also point to frequency of L2 use being the strongest factor for native-like production for the English native bilinguals, and proficiency being the strongest factor for the French native bilinguals. L2 → L1 effects are strongest in the groups with high proficiency, with speakers that have both English and French as native languages.

This thesis is primarily concerned with language production. In particular it investigates two issues: First, it explores some of the processing mechanisms underlying the production of different syntactic structures and word orders. Second, it explores the production of different syntactic structures and word order from a developmental perspective. These two issues are investigated experimentally and from a cross-linguistic point of view. First, a description is given of the possible word order permutations that Catalan allows and under which circumstances these word orders are produced. This is extended with a corpus analysis of spoken Catalan. The aim of this study is twofold: on the one hand, it aims to present the different positions where subjects and complements of the verb can appear in a sentence. On the other, it aims to compare the use of passivization between spoken and newspaper text in Catalan. Second, my experimental work in language production in four languages is presented. These languages include English, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan and Spanish. The main aim of this study is to explore the effects of the non-linguistic factors of animacy and frequency upon the production of different word orders. The results of four experiments in the four languages mentioned yield evidence that these non-linguistic factors affect the on-line processing of language production. In the four languages, participants tend to prefer to produce syntactic structures which allow animate entities to be realised as the sentential subject, even if this means producing a passive structure rather than a (usually preferred) active structure. I have also found evidence that in some languages (e.g. Catalan and Spanish) animate/frequent entities appear at initial sentence position in the grammatical category of object (in dislocated active constructions). These results are explained on the light of some of the models of language production (e.g. Bock 1987a; Bock and Levelt 1994). Third, further cross-linguistic experiments in three languages (English, Catalan and Spanish) are presented. There I show that one particular contextual factor, discourse salience, can also affect the realisation of different syntactic structures during production. Entities which have been made more salient by the preceding context are more likely to appear as sentential subjects or in early sentential positions than entities which have also been introduced in previous discourse but are less salient. I suggest that these effects can be explained using the same mechanisms that explain other non-linguistic factors (e.g. animacy). The results also suggest that in the absence of context, animacy is a strong determinant of syntactic structure and word order, whereas in context, discourse salience may largely override animacy effects. Finally, these results suggest that from a processing point of view, the Given/New partition is not enough to account for the information structure of a sentence, but a more fine-grained distinction is need, in keeping with some recent pragmatic theories (e.g. Prince 1981, 1992; Sgall et al. 1986). Finally, I investigate the production of different word orders from a developmental point of view. In particular I examine the relationship between age and the production of different word orders by Catalan children, ranging from 4;11 to 11;11 years. The results of an experiment run with these children show that a dislocated active is a construction already consolidated at age 5. In contrast, the passive clause is a construction still not fully acquired at age 11. These results seem to suggest that for Catalan children, a dislocated active is a syntactic structure that is available earlier than the passive structure. Conversely, the placement of a patient in subject position and the creation of a verbal passive voice occurs later than simple word order permutation. Finally, a comparison between these results and existing results from English children shows that there are cross-linguistic differences on the age of production of passive clauses: while English children already produce passives at age 5, Catalan children start producing passives at age 11. I suggest some possible explanations for the cross-linguistic differences in the production of different syntactic structures. Overall, the main aim for this study is to gain insight into the production of different syntactic structures and word orders from a psycholinguistic and developmental point of view.

Language production is ubiquitous in everyday life. A critical component of language production is the retrieval of individual words. In this thesis, we investigated the process of lexical access across six experiments that required participants to produce words in different contexts. First, we examined whether semantic relationships between proper names lead to competition during lexical access. Participants were asked to name celebrity pictures after either reading a famous or non-famous prime name or classifying a prime name as belonging to a famous or non-famous person. Results revealed that successful name retrievals decreased with increasing trial number. Within individual trials, tip-of-the-tongue states increased only after the classification of famous prime names. These findings indicate that the effects of competition from related proper names vary based on the particular semantic context in which they are retrieved. Next, we examined how the broader semantic context of sentences affects access to object names. It is widely accepted that highly constraining contexts can facilitate lexical access through predictive processing. We examined whether prediction during language processing still confers a benefit in situations where predictions were either almost correct or completely incorrect. In three experiments that investigated both language production and comprehension, we found a clear cost to incorrect predictions which we hypothesize may be used as an error signal in language learning to fine tune the language system. Finally, we investigated function word production using a task that required individuals to read aloud short paragraphs that contained errors on function words under distracting versus silent conditions. We found that background speech did not affect the likelihood that speakers would spontaneously correct the errors, but did increase non-target function word substitution errors. Overall, these studies support a framework in which lexical access is influenced by both word-class and semantic context at the point of retrieval. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Language plays a key role in our everyday lives, including in social interactions, academic success, and overall daily functioning. The process of producing and understanding language is deceptively easy for the average person, but there are significant outstanding questions about how linguistic processes operate. The retrieval of individual words in particular has been the subject of decades of investigation. The goal of the present thesis is to investigate how we retrieve words when we speak, or the process of lexical access, by eliciting production of words across various contexts. The studies reported here demonstrate the effects of semantic context on lexical access, as well as how this process differs for words that convey syntactic versus meaningful content (i.e., words that differ in lexical class). Our findings build on theories of lexical access by demonstrating unique effects of the roles of semantic contexts and lexical class on word retrieval.

This dissertation presents experimental research on speech errors in Tunisian Arabic (TA). The central empirical questions revolve around properties of `exchange errors'. These errors can mis-order lexical, morphological, or sound elements in a variety of patterns. TA's nonconcatenative morphology shows interesting interactions of phrasal and lexical constraints with morphological structure during language production and affords different and revealing error potentials linking the production system with linguistic knowledge.The dissertation studies expand and test generalizations based on Abd-El-Jawad and Abu-Salim's (1987) study of spontaneous speech errors in Jordanian Arabic by experimentally examining apparent regularities in data from real-time language processing perspective. The studies address alternative accounts of error phenomena that have figured prominently in accounts of production processing. Three experiments were designed and conducted based on an error elicitation paradigm used by Ferreira and Humphreys (2001). Experiment 1 tested within-phrase exchange errors focused on root versus non-root exchanges and lexical versus non-lexical outcomes for root and non-root errors. Experiments 2 and 3 addressed between-phrase exchange errors focused on violations of the Grammatical Category Constraint (GCC).The study of exchange potentials for the within-phrase items (experiment 1) contrasted lexical and non-lexical outcomes. The expectation was that these would include a significant number of root exchanges and that the lexical status of the resulting forms would not preclude error. Results show that root and vocalic pattern exchanges were very rare and that word forms rather than root forms were the dominant influence in the experimental performance. On the other hand, the study of exchange errors across phrasal boundaries of items that do or do not correspond in grammatical category (experiments 2 and 3) pursued two principal questions, one concerning the error rate and the second concerning the error elements. The expectation was that the errors predominantly come from grammatical category matches. That outcome would reinforce the interpretation that processing operations reflect the assignment of syntactically labeled elements to their location in phrasal structures. Results corroborated with the expectation. However, exchange errors involving words of different grammatical categories were also frequent. This has implications for speech monitoring models and the automaticity of the GCC.

Natural language is characterised by enormous linguistic variation (e.g., Fetzer (2003)). Such variation is not random, but is determined by a number of contextual factors. These factors encapsulate the socio-cultural conventions of a speech community and dictate the socially acceptable, i.e. polite, use of language. Producing polite language may not always be a trivial task. The ability to assess a situation with respect to a hearer’s social, cultural or emotional needs constitutes a crucial facet of a speaker’s social and linguistic competence. It is surprising then that it is also a facet which, to date, has received very little attention from researchers in the natural language generation community. Linguistic variation occurs in all linguistic sub-domains including the language of education (Person et al., 1995). Thanks to being relatively more constrained (and hence more predictable with respect to its intentional aspects than normal conversations), teachers’ language is taken in this thesis as a starting point for building a formal, computational model of language generation based on the theory of linguistic politeness. To date, the most formalised theory of linguistic politeness is that by Brown and Levinson (1987), in which face constitutes the central notion. With its two dimensions of Autonomy and Approval, face can be used to characterise different linguistic choices available to speakers in a systematic way. In this thesis, the basic idea of face is applied in the analysis of teachers’ corrective responses produced in real one-to-one and classroom dialogues, and it is redefined to suit the educational context. A computational model of selecting corrective responses is developed which demonstrates how the two dimensions of face can be derived from a situation and how they can be used to classify the many linguistic choices available to teachers. The model is fully implemented using a combination of naive Bayesian Networks and Case-Based Reasoning techniques. The evaluation of the model confirms the validity of the model, by demonstrating that politeness-based natural language generation in the context of teachers’ corrective responses can be used to model linguistic variation and that the resulting language is not singnificantly different from that produced by a human in identical situations.

Through linguistic abilities, our brain can comprehend and produce an infinite number of new sentences constructed from a finite set of words. Although recent research has uncovered the neural representation of semantics during comprehension of isolated words or adjective-noun phrases, the neural representation of the words during utterance planning is less understood. We apply existing machine learning methods to Magnetoencephalography (MEG) data recorded during a picture naming experiment, and predict the semantic properties of uttered words before they are said. We explore the representation of concepts over time, under controlled tasks, with varying compositional requirements. Our results imply that there is enough information in brain activity recorded by MEG to decode the semantic properties of the words during utterance planning. Also, we observe a gradual improvement in the semantic decoding of the first uttered word, as the participant is about to say it. Finally, we show that, compared to non-compositional tasks, planning to compose an adjective-noun phrase is associated with an enhanced and sustained representation of the noun. Our results on the neural mechanisms of basic compositional structures are a small step towards the theory of language in the brain. / Graduate

This thesis addresses the cognitive basis of syntactic adaptation, which biases speakers to repeat their own syntactic constructions and those of their conversational partners. I address two types of syntactic adaptation: short-term priming and longterm adaptation. I develop two metrics for syntactic adaptation within a speaker and between speakers in dialogue: one for short-term priming effects that decay quickly, and one for long-term adaptation over the course of a dialogue. Both methods estimate adaptation in large datasets consisting of transcribed human-human dialogue annotated with syntactic information. Two such corpora in English are used: Switchboard, a collection of spontaneous phone conversation, and HCRC Map Task, a set of task-oriented dialogues in which participants describe routes on a map to one another. I find both priming and long-term adaptation in both corpora, confirming well-known experimental results (e.g., Bock, 1986b). I extend prior work by showing that syntactic priming effects not only apply to selected syntactic constructions that are alternative realizations of the same semantics, but still hold when a broad variety of syntactic phrase structure rules are considered. Each rule represents a cognitive decision during syntactic processing. I show that the priming effect for a rule is inversely proportional to its frequency. With this methodology, I test predictions of the Interactive Alignment Model (IAM, Pickering and Garrod, 2004). The IAM claims that linguistic and situation model agreement between interlocutors in dialogue is the result of a cascade of resource-free, mechanistic priming effects on various linguistic levels. I examine task-oriented dialogue in Map Task, which provides a measure of task success through the deviance of the communicated routes on the maps. I find that long term syntactic adaptation predicts communicative success, and it does so earlier than lexical adaptation. The result is applied in a machine-learning based model that estimates task success based on the dialogue, capturing 14 percent of the variance in Map Task. Short-term syntactic priming differs qualitatively from long term adaptation, as it does not predict task success, providing evidence against learning as a single cognitive basis of adaptation effects. I obtain further evidence for the correlation between semantic activity and syntactic priming through a comparison of the Map Task and Switchboard corpora, showing that short-term priming is stronger in task-oriented dialogue than in spontaneous conversation. This difference is evident for priming between and within speakers, which suggests that priming is a mechanistic rather than strategic effect. I turn to an investigation of the level at which syntactic priming influences language production. I establish that the effect applies to structural syntactic decisions as opposed to all surface sequences of lexical categories. To do so, I identify pairs of part-of-speech categories which consistently cross constituent boundaries defined by the phrase structure analyses of the sentences. I show that such distituents are less sensitive to priming than pairs occurring within constituents. Thus, syntactic priming is sensitive to syntactic structure. The notion of constituent structure differs among syntactic models. Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG, Steedman, 2000) formalizes flexible constituent structure, accounting a varying degree of incrementality in syntactic sentence planning. I examine whether priming effects can support the predictions of CCG using the Switchboard corpus, which has been annotated with CCG syntax. I confirm the syntactic priming effect for lexical and non-lexical CCG categories, which encode partially satisfied subcategorization frames. I then show that both incremental and normal-form constituent structures exhibit priming, arguing for language production accounts that support flexible incrementality. The empirical results are reflected in a cognitive model of syntactic realization in language production. The model assumes that language production is subject to the same principles and constraints as any other form of cognition and follows the ACT-R framework (Anderson et al., 2004). Its syntactic process implements my empirical results on priming and is based on CCG. Syntactic planning can take place incrementally and non-incrementally. The model is able to generate simple sentences that vary syntactically, similar to the materials used in the experimental priming literature. Syntactic adaptation emerges due to a preferential and sped-up memory retrieval of syntactic categories describing linearization and subcategorization requirements. Long-term adaptation is explained as a form of learning, while shortterm priming is the result of a combination of learning and spreading activation from semantic and lexical material. Simulations show that the model produces the adaptation effects and their inverse frequency interaction, as well as cumulativity of long-term adaptation.

Bilingual language production is an area of psycholinguistic research that has received recent attention. Experimental evidence from bilingual word production tasks has shown that both languages share representation at the mental lexicon, meaning that concepts will lead to the activation of the target lemma from both languages. Investigations into how bilinguals organise two grammatical systems has largely come from cross-linguistic syntactic priming. Syntactic priming is a phenomenon in which speakers are likely to repeat a syntactic structure in which they have recently experienced: cross-linguistic syntactic priming is when a speaker uses a syntactic structure in one language because they have recently experienced that structure from the other language. Together, the study of the bilingual lexicon and syntactic representations have led to the development of models of bilingual language production. A more recent experimental paradigm is the forced code-switching task in which participants are required to code-switch in some experimental trials. The forced code-switching task is the experimental method used in this thesis. This thesis aims to use this experimental task to test my proposed model of bilingual language production, the Hybrid model. The Hybrid model proposes an architecture of the bilingual lemma stratum that differs from previous models of bilingual language production. The Hybrid model assumes that lexical items from one language can be produced using the syntactic structure of the other language. In this thesis I report seven experiments testing the proposed lemma stratum of the Hybrid model. Experiment 3.1 investigated the production of prenominal adjectives of English and postnominal adjectives of Spanish during code-switching between Spanish and English to see whether speakers would use the lexical items from one language with the word order of the other language. The results showed that speakers almost exclusively used the word order dictated by the language in which they produced the lexical items. This did not support the proposed lemma stratum of the Hybrid model. Experiments 4.1 and 4.2 investigated gender agreement of possessive pronouns during code-switching between Spanish and English to see if the possessive pronoun from one language could be produced using the gender agreement rules from the other language. The results showed that English-Spanish and Spanish-English bilinguals sometimes produced possessive pronouns in one language with the gender agreement rules from the other language. It was demonstrated that this effect was not due to a misunderstanding of the gender agreement rules of the participants' second language. These results support the proposed lemma stratum of the Hybrid model. Experiments 5.1 and 5.2 investigated gender agreement of possessive determiners during code-switching between French and English to see if the possessive determiner from one language could be produced using the gender agreement rules from the other language. The results showed that English-French and French-English bilinguals sometimes produced possessive determiners in one language with the gender agreement rules from the other language. It was demonstrated that this effect was not due to a misunderstanding of the gender agreement rules of the participants' second language. These results support the proposed lemma stratum of the Hybrid model. Experiments 6.1 and 6.2 investigated the production of determiners during code-switching between German and English. Of specific interest was whether English determiners would be produced more often than German determiners because German determiners hold case information whereas English determiners do not. In Experiment 6.1 participants were forced to code-switch before an accusative NP. The results showed that English determiners were sometimes produced within the German NPs, but German determiners were not used within the English NPs. In Experiment 6.2 participants were forced to code-switch before a dative NP. The results showed that participants almost exclusively produced the determiner in the same language as the target noun. Analysing the frequencies of the determiner used within the experimental session, the different pattern of results between Experiments 6.1 and 6.2 may be a result of a competition for selection between determiner forms. To conclude the thesis I discuss the implications of these findings, what they mean for the Hybrid model, and directions for future research.

This thesis focuses on the issue of how language users refer to an entity during discourse production, by investigating representations and processes that underlie the choice between pronouns and repeated noun phrases. Past research has shown that the use of pronouns (relative to more explicit expressions) is affected by the referent’s salience in the prior linguistic context, but much less is known about how non-linguistic context affects the referent’s salience and the choice of expression. Recent research has suggested that the referent’s non-linguistic salience has no effect on the choice of pronouns and names (Arnold & Griffin, 2007). One of the major findings of the research reported in this thesis is that the referent's salience in the visual context plays an important role in the form of reference: Pronouns were less frequent (relative to repeated noun phrases) when the competitor was present than absent in the visual context. My second major finding is that similarity-based interference affects the choice of referring expressions. Pronouns are less frequent when discourse entities are similar in terms of their inherent conceptual properties as well as extrinsic properties, suggesting that the more similar the competitor to the referent, the stronger the interference, reducing pronoun usage. My third major finding is that contrary to many linguistic theories that assume that speakers choose referring expressions that are optimally helpful for their addressee (Ariel, 1990; Clark & Marshall, 1981; Givón, 1983), speakers do not choose expressions by adopting the addressee's discourse model: Pronouns are more frequent when the referent is salient to the speaker, not to the addressee. I argue that the explicitness of referring expressions is affected by the degree of conceptual access that is needed to initiate production processes: The more conceptual access is needed, the more elaborate expressions tend to be produced.