Variation in the speech signal as a window into the cognitive architecture of language production

Abstract

The pronunciation of words is highly variable. This variation provides crucial information about the cognitive architecture of the language production system. This review summarizes key empirical findings about variation phenomena, integrating corpus, acoustic, articulatory, and chronometric data from phonetic and psycholinguistic studies. It examines how these data constrain our current understanding of word production processes and highlights major challenges and open issues that should be addressed in future research.

Keywords: Language production; Phonetics; Phonology; Psycholinguistic models; Variation.