Producing Language & Action

The papers on this page dig into what is and isn’t unique about talking.

We humans are the only species that talks, and we’d like to understand what mental machinery makes us different from all the non-talking species in the world. In these papers, colleagues and I ask whether the way humans plan their talk is or isn’t similar to the way we plan actions like reaching or playing a musical instrument.

What we find is that some classic aspects of talking also show up in actions. These include “easy first”—starting with easy words or actions before producing more difficult words or actions. Another commonality is that we reuse both sentence structures and action patterns we’ve recently produced. A third is that we plan both language and actions incrementally, assembling actions and sentences just in time and beginning to talk or act while still planning upcoming parts of the talking or action.

Talking is a form of action, and it is reassuring to see that these features of talk planning are seen in other actions too. This relationship between talk and action planning shows that whatever it is that is uniquely human about talking, it’s not about how talking is planned. That’s helpful to know in our continued search to understand what is and isn’t uniquely human in our use of language.

One fun paper is Beaty et al. (2022), in which we found that jazz musicians use the same Easy First sequencing of their musical phrases that we see in sequencing of words and phrases in our talking.

* Papers marked with an asterisk are commentaries.