ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the overview of the research methods used in studying L1 speech production. Although a number of different views exist as regards how lexical encoding takes place in L1, for certain questions there is remarkable agreement among researchers. Research into speech planning and conceptualization is traditionally carried out not only in the field of psycholinguistics but also in fields such as sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis. The chapter discusses the methods of language production research that can be divided into three different groups: observational, experimental, and neuroimaging. Observational methods involve the distributional analysis of spontaneous speech and the study of disfluencies and errors in spontaneous speech. Experimental methods used in the field of cognitive psychology to study speech production are numerous. Neuroimaging techniques used in investigating speech production can be divided into three groups: event-related brain potential (ERP), positron emission tomography (PET), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies.
