The Architecture of the Speech Production System

Gregory Hickok

Speech production has been studied predominantly from within two traditions, psycholinguistics and motor control. These traditions have rarely interacted, and the resulting chasm between these approaches seems to reflect a level of analysis difference: whereas motor control is concerned with lower-level articulatory control, psycholinguistics focuses on higher-level linguistic processing. However, closer examination of both approaches reveals a substantial convergence of ideas. I will present an integrated psycholinguistic and motor control model of speech production, the “hierarchical state feedback control” model, along with new evidence from computational modeling, fMRI, lesion-based research.