UNIVERSIDADE COMUNITÁRIA DA REGIÃO DE CHAPECÓ –
UNOCHAPECÓ
CURSO DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO LATO SENSU EM:
Ensino de Língua Inglesa
Disciplina: Ensino e Aprendizagem de Produção Oral
Carga Horária: 45h/a
Ano/Semestre: 2015/2
Professora: Donesca Cristina Puntel Xhafaj
Aluno: Samuel Rolim Daga
Summary of Levelt’s text
The article is about a bilingual production model based on Levelt’s Speaking
model.
The generation of speech is not instantaneous. The amount of time that the
generation of speech will take will depend on a number of factors: who you’re talking
to, in which situation, what you’re saying to this person and what this person is saying
to you, etc.
The basis of the ability to speak is the interaction of processing components that
are mostly autonomous.They are ‘simple’, but the way they interact and co-operate is
what makes the model intelligent.
Levelt say that the model he is proposing is a working model because he
expected that it would change with time. Conceptualization is the most demanding of
all processes in the generation of speech. It is mainly about deciding what to say.
During conceptualization we have to deal with the linearization problem which is decide
what we are going to say first, what comes next, and so on.
Perspective talking is also part of conceptualization. It’s how you’re going to
‘relate’ things to others. E.g., you can say ‘the kitchen is next to the bathroom’, or ‘the
bathroom is next to the kitchen’. We have a tendency to relate the smaller object in
reference to a larger one. E.g., ‘there is a chair in front of the cupboard’, instead of
‘there is cupboard behind a chair’.
In the bilingual production model we have intrinsic and deitic perspectives. In a
deitic perspective, I’m looking at things from the outside, as if they were in a sheet of
paper.In an intrinsic perspective, I’m part of it, it’s as if I’m looking at things/moving
along them.
When conceptualization is finished, we have a pre-verbal message that it’s nonlinguistic. That is, it’s a structure with lexical concepts in a given order.
The formulator performs 2 operations: Grammatical encoding and phonological
encoding. The first step of grammatical encoding is retrieve the appropriate words for
those lexical concepts in the pre-verbal message from our lexicon (a ‘store’ of words) –
this retrieval is usually fully automatic – ordering them, and shaping them
morphologically.
We retrieve words from the lexicon, each word in the lexicon brings with it
information about the syntactic environment that word requires. This unification,
though fast and efficient, is unintelligent, since it ignores semantics.
During phonological encoding we retrieve isolated syllables. The output of
phonological encoding are syllables. We organize the phonemes in the syllables that
will realize them. Sometimes a phoneme of a given word will combine with phonemes
of another word and form a new syllable, depending on the metrics.
We also have in our process of speaking a syllabary which is a ‘store’ of
syllables and it has the purposeof providing us with the articulatory gesture for each of
the syllables we generate. As soon as phonological encoding ends, we ‘turn’ to the
syllabary to retrieve the phonetic gesture the articulator will need to perform in order to
produce that given sound. This is part of phonetic encoding.
Besides syllable retrieval we have involved intonation, pauses, loudness, and
patternsin phonetic encoding. The final output of the formulator is an articulatory plan
that presents itself to us as internal speech.
Thanks to our speech apparatusthe articulatory plan finally become overt speech.
It’s admirable that we use an apparatus made for breathing, drinking, eating,
swallowing, to produce speech and that we can continue to breathe, drink, eat, and
swallow at the same time.
The apparatus that allows us to listen to our own speech is the same that we use
to listen to the speech of other people. The same way we detect errors in other’s speech
we can detect errors in our own speech and, if we have time or find it important to
correct we can stop speech before it actually comes out.
In self-monitoringLevelt identifiedthree phases: Halting speech (errors or
inappropriateness – done as soon as the trouble is detected – even in the middle of
words); Editing (using specific terms to signal that a problem was identified – e.g., ‘-er’,
‘sorry’, ‘that is’…); Re-starting speech (syntactically principled – that is, if the previous
speech was in the past, the repair will follow this way, if the subject is doctor, the repair
will have to have as its subject doctor.
Well, after reading Levelt’s proposal I guess I changed my perception of speech
production. Speech production is a really complex thing. I have never thought that such
process was so hard. I confess I didn’t understand so clearly all things that I have read,
but from my understanding be able to speak a second language is almost a miracle,
because it isn’t an easy task. Now, I understand better most of my students who say that
speak in English is impossible for them.
Besides all the astonishment I was happy to realize how intelligent we are.
Human being is the only living being in the world that is able to develop such process
and speak. I was even happier to realize that I am able to speak two languages. I felt
proud of myself. Although it was difficult to understand some things it was a really nice
text. I like it a lot.