This special issue on language production is based on a selection of contributions to the Second International Workshop on Language Production held in August 2005 in Maastricht. The volume is an overview of new directions within language production research and includes papers on word selection and its modelling, the production of pauses in sentence production, the interaction between spontaneous gestures and speech, and changes in language production behaviour in ageing.

This special issue on language production is based on a selection of contributions to the Second International Workshop on Language Production held in August 2005 in Maastricht. The volume is an overview of new directions within language production research and includes papers on word selection and its modelling, the production of pauses in sentence production, the interaction between spontaneous gestures and speech, and changes in language production behaviour in ageing.

This special issue presents an overview of recent research conducted in the field of language production. Its articles are based on talks presented at the first edition of the International Workshop on Language Production (Marseille, France, September 2004). The articles in the special issue deal with three different topics of general interest for models of language production: A. the general organizational principles of the language production system (representations, spread of activation, monitoring), B. several aspects of the lexical selection process and C. the representations and processes used during syntactic encoding.

The Oxford Handbook of Language Production provides a comprehensive, multidisciplinary review of the complex mechanisms involved in language production. It describes what we know of the computational, linguistic, cognitive, and brain basis of human language production - from how we conceive the messages we aim to convey, to how we retrieve the right (and sometimes wrong) words, how we form grammatical sentences, and how we assemble and articulate individual sounds. Contributions from leading psycholinguists, cognitive linguists, and neuroscientists offer readers a broad perspective on the latest research, highlighting key investigations into core aspects of human language processing. The Handbook is organized into three sections: speaking, written and sign languages, and how language production interfaces with the wider cognitive system, including control processes, memory, non-linguistic gestures, and the perceptual system. These chapters discuss a wide array of levels of representation, from sentences to individual words, speech sounds and articulatory gestures, extending to discourse and the broader social context of speaking. Detailed supporting chapters provide an overview of key issues in linguistic structure at each level of representation. Authoritative yet concisely written, the volume will be of interest to scholars and students working in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience, computer science, audiology, and education, and related fields.