Keynote Speaker: Niels Schiller — Phonetics 2025 Hong Kong

Speaking is one of the most complex human skills. Producing speech is an extremely fast process that includes lots of planning ahead. Nevertheless, it is very robust and in informal speech we only make about one speech error in thousand words. In my talk, I will describe the cognitive processes that take place during speaking, from conceptualisation, via lexical access and lexical selection, to word form encoding and articulation. I will illustrate each process by experimental work.
I will especially zoom into word selection from the mental lexicon and the representation and processing of lexico-syntactic features, such as grammatical gender in Indo-European languages but also classifiers in Mandarin Chinese. I will also present data from L2 learners of grammatical gender and classifier systems.
Furthermore, I will present data on word-form encoding, especially morphological encoding (compounding) and phonological encoding (syllables). These data have been acquired with several distinct methodologies (behavioural, electrophysiological, neuroimaging) and from distinct populations (neurotypical participants and patients).
I will conclude by arguing that the combination of different research methodologies, populations, and languages will lead a more comprehensive insights into speech processing.