Language production: Methods and methodologies

Methodological problems have been a longstanding barrier to the systematic exploration of issues in language production. Recently, however, production research has broadened beyond traditional observational approaches to include a diverse set of experimental paradigms. This review surveys the observational and experimental methods that are used to study production, the questions to which the methods have been directed, and the theoretical assumptions that the methods embody. Although tailored to the investigation of language production, most of the methods are closely related to others that are widely employed in cognitive research. The common denominator of these procedures is verbal responding. Because the processing complexities of verbal responses are sometimes overlooked in research on memory, perception, attention, and language comprehension, the methodological assumptions of production research have implications for other experimental procedures that are used to elicit spoken words or sentences.