ABSTRACT
It is tantalizingly difficult to observe how anyone actually plans and produces speech. When somebody utters a sentence, we have very little idea how long it actually took to plan it, and what processes were involved. It is equally hard to devise experiments to test what is going on. There are relatively few reported in psycholinguistic journals, compared with the thousands available on speech comprehension. Consequently, we shall be very tentative over any conclusions we draw. As Fodor et al. commented over a quarter-century ago: ‘Practically anything that one can say about speech production must be considered speculative, even by the standards current in psycholinguistics’ (1974: 434). Almost the same is true in the twenty-first century: ‘There has been less research on language production than on language comprehension . . . The investigation of production is perceived to be more difficult than the investigation of comprehension’ (Harley 2001: 349).
