the COGnitive basis of LEXical selection – CogLex

When a speaker produces an utterance, a variety of choices and decisions have to be made. The speaker needs to decide what (s)he wants to talk about (e.g. my Sunday morning or my Monday morning occupations?), then select the words that are most appropriate to express the message (e.g. should I say table or desk?), and also to retrieve certain words that are constrained by the retrieval of other words (e.g. when speaking French, will the next article be la or le?) These examples show that lexical selection is constrained to variable degrees and by variable sources of information: the language production system appears to take a variety of decisions on the basis of different mechanisms. One shared feature across current cognitive models describing language production is their primary interest in how linguistic information is represented, and how activation circulates in the representational system. This focus leaves outside the scope of the research an exhaustive investigation of the cognitive principles underlying activation and selection. This has happened despite the fact that the processes of response selection in other tasks (e.g. two-alternative forced-choice) have received a lot of attention, and have lead to a variety of articulated proposals. Are response selection and lexical selection similar events, or does language production rely on specific mechanisms to select information? We propose an interdisciplinary investigation to address this question. Our project is motivated by the lack of an articulated integration of language production theories with cognitive descriptions of response selection. We will combine a psycholinguistic framework with models of optimal decision making, and with an information-theoretical approach for computational modeling. The experimental evidence will come from behavioral and electrophyisiological experiments. Our goal is to understand better the sequence of cognitive events by which a word is activated and selected during language production.