[Control processes in speech production: flexibility and determination of event related speech planning]

The issue of our study is the flexibility of high level adjustments for the process of relating events. Our assumptions are based on the Mannheim Regulation Theory of Speech Production, in which three modes of central control are distinguished: stimulus control, schema control, and ad hoc control. Our first experiment shows that verbal accounts of an event (due to selection and construction processes) as well as the interindividual variability of this accounts (due to the control mode being less or more restricted) are strongly determined by the situational characteristics in which they are produced. In our second experiment, pressure of time is introduced into the speech production task as a disturbance factor to put some load on the attentional resources thus uncovering the flexibility vs. automaticity of the speech production process. A comparison of the results favors the assumption of verbal accounts of an event being produced by strong schematic control in a highly institutionalized situation, whereas verbal accounts of the same event in an unofficial, private situation are produced by more ad hoc planning. The results permit to psychologically reconstruct the narrating of events and the reporting of events as speech production processes which are guided by different control modes with respect to their flexibility and to their attentional demands.