Word Production: Behavioral and Computational Considerations

What happens when a person names a picture? To a first approximation, the answer to this question is uncontroversial. The speaker must identify the pictured object, determine that object’s name, and say it. Putting it more formally, the production of a word in a task such as picture naming involves conceptualization, linguistic formulation, and articulation (Levelt, 1989). The controversy begins when we try to spell out these components in any detail. In this chapter, we discuss data that are informative about the linguistic formulation of single-word utterances, and focus on attempts to simulate its inner workings with computational models.