Among the set of processes posited in psycholinguistic theories of spoken language production is the translation (or 'mapping') from a basic representation of sound structure retrieved from long-term memory to a more elaborated representation that may engage motor planning and implementation subsystems. In linguistic theory, the phonological grammar is defined as the computation required to generate the set of well-formed 'output' representations from a (typically less-elaborated) 'lexical' representation. This dissertation is concerned with unifying these ideas, and characterizing the 'grammar' in the spoken language production system, focusing on the representations active in the spoken production grammar as well as the well-formedness constraints on the 'output' representations.; The data used to address these issues are primarily from the spoken production patterns of a brain-damaged individual, VBR. VBR's impairment is shown to reflect impairment to the spoken production 'grammar,' and the pattern of errors she produces are characterized as 'repairs' instituted by this grammar. One notable pattern is the insertion of a vowel into word-initial obstruent-sonorant consonant clusters (e.g., bleed → [belid]). An acoustic and articulatory investigation presented here suggests that this error arises from a discrete insertion of a vowel, and not from either articulatory 'noise' or from a 'mis'-timing of the articulations associated with the consonants. It is argued that this requires a system of sound structure representation that permits the grammar to insert discrete sound structure units into the articulatory plan.; VBR does not insert a vowel on every production token of these forms, and there is variability in the rate of vowel insertion depending on the identity of the onset consonants. This variability is taken to reflect that a speaker's spoken production grammar distinguishes 'degrees of well-formedness' among forms that occur in their language. Another investigation seeks to identify the source of this type of grammatical knowledge. Based on a consonant cluster production study with VBR, it is argued that the spoken production grammar encodes both cross-linguistic regularities of sound structure representation as well as language-particular regularities reflecting the frequency of certain sound structure sequences in the words in a speaker's lexicon.; Jakobson (1941/1968) has famously argued that the same principles that govern cross-linguistic regularities of sound structure also govern patterns of production in cases of 'language loss.' A novel test of this claim is presented, in which it is shown that VBR's grammar is constrained by the same principles that account for the grammar of English. Crucially, it is shown that vowel insertion is the strategy used to repair consonant clusters, while a different strategy is used to repair other complex forms which her grammatical impairment causes her to avoid.; The results of these studies are integrated with a view of the spoken production processing system that contains a 'grammar' component. This proposal unifies the rich representational descriptions of sound structure and well-formedness constraints in linguistic theory with the process-oriented descriptions of psycholinguistic theory.
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