ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to weave the lines of speech production and automaticity research together and discusses how the development of various types of speech-encoding mechanisms might be explained with the help of different theories of automaticity. 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 reviews various definitions of automaticity and concluded that the interpretation of this term is largely dependent on how one sees the process of automatization. Automatization in this field of speech production can be best explained by memory strength theories, including connectionism. Two main groups of theories of automaticity exist- rule-based and item-based approaches. Strength theories were found to be the suited best for explaining automaticity in lexical retrieval, whereas to rule-based syntactic and phonological encoding mechanisms both Andersons theories of proceduralization and chunking theories can be applied.
