The Language Production Group studies the way in which a speaker, in a conversational setting or otherwise, formulates some intention, or expresses some idea in speech.
Current research focuses on the generation of simple utterances.
Among the simplest utterances we produce are single words. The ability to produce words is, of course, a core ingredient of the ability to produce larger utterances. Therefore, single word access has been and still is a central research topic of the Department. Upon presenting the picture of an object, a multi-stage process unfolds over a period of about 600 milliseconds. It involves object recognition, activating a lexical concept, selecting the target word from the mental lexicon, retrieving its phonological code, computing its syllabification and prosody in context, and generating a phonetic plan for the articulatory execution of the word.