Melissa Redford

The title of this project refers to the speed at which adults speak. The number was first put forward by Lenneberg (1967), and has come to stand for the marvelous and intriguing complexity of fluent speech production. The proposed project is to provide an account of speaking that ties the representations guiding speech movement to speech motor skills, planning routines to cognitive processes, and speaking to language. The hypothesis is that the representations and routines that govern speaking emerge with communicative goal achievement over developmental time, where goal achievement is constrained by changing speech motor and cognitive skills. I am applying for a European Institutes for Advanced Study (EURIAS) Fellowship to pursue this hypothesis in a book length manuscript that will describe a developmentally sensitive model of speech-language production. The proposed book will draw from a variety of literatures, including the literature on non-language motor skill acquisition and control, speech motor skill development, memory and planning in language production, the development of relevant cognitive processes, language acquisition, and linguistic theory. The goal is to arrange the findings from disparate fields into a coherent account of speaking that is psychologically plausible, developmentally sensitive, and computationally implementable. A further goal is to construct the model so that it is compatible with the neuropsychological literature on speech-language. This goal reflects my future aspiration to investigate brain-°©‐behavior relationships in the development of speech-language production. To this end, I am applying for residency at 3 participating institutes that offer rich, interdisciplinary intellectual environments and substantial opportunity to engage with and learn from researchers working on brain-language relationships.