speechidé

Speechidé is a term used in some contemporary discussions of language production to denote the internal representation that guides the planning and execution of spoken utterances. The word blends English speech with idé, a root meaning idea used in several European languages, signaling the integration of content and form in speech planning.

Definition and scope: A speechidé refers to the cohesive plan that bundles propositional content, discourse structure, communicative intent, and prosodic strategy. It acts as a mental blueprint the speaker relies on during planning before articulation, shaping word choice, syntax, ordering, and intonation.

Theoretical role: In production models, the speechidé sits between semantic encoding and articulatory execution, linking what is said to how it is said. It is distinct from a speech act, which concerns illocutionary force, yet related to ideational content and plan-based accounts of speech.

Research and methods: The term appears in some cognitive-linguistic discussions as a heuristic for modeling speech planning. Investigations use production experiments, eye-tracking, corpus analyses, and computational modeling to infer speechidé from data such as hesitations, repairs, and prosodic patterns.

Applications: Understanding speechidé can inform natural language generation in AI, second-language instruction, and forensic linguistics by clarifying how speakers organize content and form during spontaneous speech.

See also: language production, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody.

Note: speechidé is not universally standardized and may be used variably across authors as a theoretical construct for speech planning.