Tuning the blueprint: how studies of implicit learning during speaking reveal the information processing components of the production system

The “blueprint for the speaker” (Levelt, 1989) claimed that production is carried out by autonomous processing components. We present a framework for how those production components may change with experience and review studies that demonstrate limitations in what can be easily learned by adult speakers. Such limitations have been observed in the acquisition of new phonotactic constraints and in speakers’ ability to alter particular verbs’ biases for particular syntactic structures. We attribute these limitations to the learned componential structure of the production system.