ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the neural substrates of speech production. It is organized in three main sections that track the time course of generating words, beginning with the formulation of communicative intentions in the realm of thoughts and feelings, and ending with the transmission of precise motor commands to the muscles constituting the respiratory, laryngeal, and supralaryngeal components of the vocal apparatus. The first section focuses on the processes that underlie the conceptually driven selection of words and the encoding of their phonological and phonetic forms. In order to provide a coherent theoretical context for
this material, emphasis is placed on one of the most prominent frameworks, namely the Lemma Model, which was developed by Willem (Pim) J. M. Levelt and his collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The second section concentrates on the processes that underlie speech motor control and the learning of new articulatory patterns. As a strategy for making sense of this complex domain, we will approach it from the perspective of one of the most advanced theories, specifically the Directions into Velocities of Articulators (DIVA) Model, which was created by Frank Guenther and his colleagues at Boston University. Finally, the third section addresses some of the features of the peripheral motor system that are essential for speech production.
