Phonetic encoding in utterance production: a review of open issues from 1989 to 2018

ABSTRACT

Phonetic encoding refers to the mapping of an abstract linguistic code of the utterance into motor programmes which guide speech articulation. The encoding of speech gestures involves complex cognitive-motor planning, which has received limited attention in the psycholinguistic literature on language production relative to linguistic encoding processes. Here we will review some issues on phonetic encoding and the related empirical results by integrating evidence from psycholinguistic, phonetic, neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies from the last 30 years. In particular, we will focus on (i) the distinction between phonological and phonetic encoding, (ii) the nature and size of phonetic representations and (iii) the dynamics of phonetic encoding in the time-course of utterance planning. We will end up showing that the transformation of a linguistic code into motor programmes likely involves a larger proportion of the overall utterance planning time than acknowledged in current models and with many open questions for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Phonetic encoding
• phonological
• syllable
• motor speech
• time-course

Acknowledgments

I acknowledge support of the Swiss National Science Foundation grant no CRSII5_173711.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Notice that in Levelt (1989) the generation of phonetic plans is embedded in the “phonological encoding” processor, but in later models (Levelt, Roelofs and Meyer, 1999), an explicit distinction is made between phonological encoding and phonetic encoding.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Swiss National Science Foundation [SNSF grant number CRSII5_173711].