MODELS OF SPEECH

PRODUCTION
“The Bock And Levelt
Model”
 WILLEM JOHANNES
MARIA LEVELT
 Dutch Psycholinguist
 born 17 may 1938 in Amsterdam
 he is an influential researcher of human language
acquisition and speech production.
 he developed a comprehensive theory of the
cognitive processes involved in the act of
speaking, including the significance of the "mental
lexicon“.
 J. KATHRYN BOCK
 currently professor of psychology and linguistics at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Champaign, Illinois,
where she conducts research in the Language Production
Laboratory at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and
Technology in Urbana, Illinois with Dr. Gary Dell

 Bock graduated from Bucknell University in Lewisburg,

Pennsylvania with her B.A. in Psychology and Russian before
moving to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for her
master's degree in Psychology and doctoral degree with a focus
on Cognitive Psychology and minor in Linguistics.
THE BOCK AND LEVELT MODEL
This model consists of four levels of processing.
1. Message level
2. Functional Level
3. Positional level
4. Phonological Encoding Level
MESSAGE LEVEL

• where the main

idea to be
conveyed is
generated
FUNCTIONAL LEVEL
• is subdivided into two stages.
• The first, the Lexical Selection stage, is where the conceptual representation is turned
into a lexical representation, as words are selected to express the intended meaning of
the desired message.
• The lexical representation is often termed the Lemma, which refers to the syntactical, but
not phonological, properties of the word. The Function Assignment stage is where the
syntactical role of each word is assigned.
POSITIONAL LEVEL
• the order and inflection of each morphological slot is
determined.
• Syntactic structure is used to order and modify words.
Sound change can occur – because syntactic
modification needs to be added to words.
PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING LEVEL

• sound units and intonation contours are

assembled to form lexemes, the embodiment of a
word's morphological and phonological
properties, which are then sent to the
articulatory or output system.
• Each level of this model is functionally distinct from the others and this
distinction is illustrated by the types of speech errors that occur at each
level. For example, substitution errors of words within the same semantic
ballpark (i.e. substituting yell> when the target was shout) occur at the
Lexical Selection stage, where as speech errors involving syntactic function
(i.e. verb tense, number, aspect) only occur at the Function Assignment stage
(i.e. saying "I likes candy" instead of "I like candy").
• At the Positional level, errors of misallocated and stranded inflection or
derivational endings occur. For example, when the sentence “He poured
some juice” is accidently pronounced as “He juiced some pour”, the stem
morpheme pour is re-allocated to the end of the sentence, stranding its
derivational ending end at the beginning of the sentence.
• The Bock and Levelt Model can account for most speech errors, and their
insertion of a self-monitoring component to the model made it also
account for filtering effects, accommodation beyond the level of
phonemes, and also provided a functional explanation for hesitations and
pauses (the time it takes for the self-monitoring system to accurately filter
and accommodate errors).
• Although this model incorporates bidirectional flow of information, it still
involves discrete serial processing in contrast to parallel-processing
models, which attempt to account for these errors by means of forward
and backward spreading of activation through parallel paths. This brings us
to the parallel models of speech production.
THANK YOU !

Reported by:
Jericko Albert Itang
Jemuel Pabuna
Joyce Crystal Cagadas