ABSTRACT
Spontaneous speech output reveals the underlying conceptual structure of utterances in the form of various traces. The traces considered include few kinds of hesitation, and the distribution of phonemic clauses. The places where hesitations and the boundaries between phonemic clauses occur are taken to show potential points where speech programs change and these are almost always where one sensory-motor-based syntagma is available to take over from another. Breakdowns, buildups, and anticipations show that the speaker manipulates, on line, speech segments that can be seen to be based on sensory-motor ideas, even when this sensory-motor structure is changing. Some of the errors, breakdowns in particular, reveal the dynamic alteration of conceptual structure. Errors that speakers make when using syntactic devices occur at points in the speech output where, according to the Parallel Augmented Transition Networks (PATN) models for these devices, information is placed into or taken out of memory stores.
