Development of temporal patterning and vocal hesitations in spontaneous narratives

Narratives were told aloud by 12 boys and 12 girls at each of seven age levels in response to nine cartoon pictures. Speech rate increased with age, due to corresponding decreases in both legnth and frequency of unfilled pauses (UPs), although the two measures were themselves uncorrelated. Parenthetical remarks (PRs) increased with age, while repeats (Rs) decreased. Location of UPs (81% before function words) was stable over age levels. Comparisons with other experiments are made. Interrelationships of speaking and thinking are discussed in terms of the cognitive and linguistic functions of length and frequency of UPs, respectively. Theories that neglect multiple psychological determinants of speech behavior and/or concentrate on only one level or unit of encoding are rejected as inadequate.     

Attention orienting effects of hesitations in speech: evidence from ERPs

Filled-pause disfluencies such as um and er affect listeners' comprehension, possibly mediated by attentional mechanisms (J. E. Fox Tree, 2001). However, there is little direct evidence that hesitations affect attention. The current study used an acoustic manipulation of continuous speech to induce event-related potential components associated with attention (mismatch negativity [MMN] and P300) during the comprehension of fluent and disfluent utterances. In fluent cases, infrequently occurring acoustically manipulated target words gave rise to typical MMN and P300 components when compared to nonmanipulated controls. In disfluent cases, where targets were preceded by natural sounding hesitations culminating in the filled pause er, an MMN (reflecting a detection of deviance) was still apparent for manipulated words, but there was little evidence of a subsequent P300. This suggests that attention was not reoriented to deviant words in disfluent cases. A subsequent recognition test showed that nonmanipulated words were more likely to be remembered if they had been preceded by a hesitation. Taken together, these results strongly implicate attention in an account of disfluency processing: Hesitations orient listeners' attention, with consequences for the immediate processing and later representation of an utterance.     

It's the way that you, er, say it: hesitations in speech affect language comprehension

Everyday speech is littered with disfluency, often correlated with the production of less predictable words (e.g., Beattie & Butterworth [Beattie, G., & Butterworth, B. (1979). Contextual probability and word frequency as determinants of pauses in spontaneous speech. Language and Speech, 22, 201-211.]). But what are the effects of disfluency on listeners? In an ERP experiment which compared fluent to disfluent utterances, we established an N400 effect for unpredictable compared to predictable words. This effect, reflecting the difference in ease of integrating words into their contexts, was reduced in cases where the target words were preceded by a hesitation marked by the word er. Moreover, a subsequent recognition memory test showed that words preceded by disfluency were more likely to be remembered. The study demonstrates that hesitation affects the way in which listeners process spoken language, and that these changes are associated with longer-term consequences for the representation of the message.     

Listeners' comprehension of uptalk in spontaneous speech

Listeners’ comprehension of phrase final rising pitch on declarative utterances, or uptalk, was examined to test the hypothesis that prolongations might differentiate conflicting functions of rising pitch. In Experiment 1 we found that listeners rated prolongations as indicating more speaker uncertainty, but that rising pitch was unrelated to ratings. In Experiment 2 we found that prolongations interacted with rising pitch when listeners monitored for words in the subsequent utterance. Words preceded by prolonged uptalk were monitored faster than words preceded by non-prolonged uptalk. In Experiment 3 we found that the interaction between rising pitch and prolongations depended on listeners’ beliefs about speakers’ mental states. Results support the theory that temporal and situational context are important in determining intonational meaning.     

The significance of pauses in spontaneous speech

Studies of filled and silent pauses performed in the last two decades are reviewed in order to determine the significance of pauses for the speaker. Following a brief history, the theoretical implications of pause location are examined and the relevant studies summarized. In addition, the functional significance of pauses is considered in terms of cognitive, affective-state, and social interaction variables.     

The common value of pausing time in spontaneous speech

Experiments have shown that hesitation increases both before and during speech concerned with the solution of verbal tasks which involve an increasing degree of syntactic or semantic complexity. These experiments have been concerned with differences between tasks. An attempt is made to compare hesitation time between individuals who are set the same tasks, in terms of the quality of their responses to the tasks. Individual dispositions to a characteristic speech-silence ratio complicate such comparisons. Here a strong trend was found between the quality of the subjects' responses and the extra time they took over and above their characteristic speech-silence ratios.     

Phonological considerations in children's early imitative and spontaneous speech

The relationship between the phonological characteristics of young children's unsolicited imitative and spontaneous speech was examined as a function of (1) the level of the children's linguistics development, and (2) the children's knowledge of the words imitated. A greater number of phonological discrepancies were seen in children with lexicons of fewer than 40 words than in children with larger lexical repertories. Such discrepancies were also more likely when the children displayed little comprehension of the words they were imitating. This tendency was particularly strong in the children with limited lexicons. The results are discussed in terms of a developmental shift in the bases of children's phonological organization.     

弱智儿童自发性话语中的情感韵律研究

本文用提取声学参数的方法,采用故事讲述任务对弱智儿童自发性话语中的情感韵律进行研究。通过与两组典型儿童-实际年龄匹配组和语言能力匹配组进行比较,探究了弱智儿童自发性话语中情感韵律的表达情况。结果发现：（1）弱智儿童的情感韵律存在一定程度的损伤,在音高范围和元音时长上均有表现;（2）弱智儿童的情感韵律独立于词汇和句法,具有模块性。     

Theories of monitoring and the timing of repairs in spontaneous speech.

This study reports the first data to be published on the timing of self-repairs in spontaneous speech, giving means and confidence intervals for cut-off-to-repair, error-to-repair, and cut-off-to-repair times for different types of repair based on 1525 repairs made in the conversational turns of 61 callers to a radio talk show. The three most detailed models of monitoring are discussed in the introduction, with emphasis on their temporal implications. Many of the cut-off-to-repair times observed were faster than would be predicted by any model in the literature. Laver's (1980) theory of monitoring is shown to be incongruent with the observed times, as is Levelt's (1983, 1989) main interruption rule. The results show that people can plan corrections to their speech while talking, and suggest that Kempen and Hoenkamp's (1987) concept of incremental processing can be extended to repairs.     

Practice effects on speech production planning: evidence from slips of the tongue in spontaneous vs. preplanned speech in Japanese

The present study addresses the question of how practice in expressing the content to be conveyed in a specific situation influences speech production planning processes. A comparison of slips of the tongue in Japanese collected from spontaneous everyday conversation and those collected from largely preplanned conversation in live-broadcast TV programs reveals that, although there are those aspects of speech production planning that are unaffected by practice, there are various practice effects, most of which can be explained in terms of automatization of the processing of content, resulting in shifts in the loci of errors.     

The occurrence of paraphasias in the spontaneous speech of children with an acquired aphasia

Two children with an acquired aphasia were observed during the recovery process. In the spontaneous speech, paraphasias belonging to different categories, such as neologisms, verbal paraphasias, and literal paraphasias, were found. Especially with regard to neologisms the time of investigation was very important. In addition, one child with a phonemic jargon aphasia and one child with a fluent aphasia and empty speech were observed. These observations implicate a modification of the current clinical picture of childhood aphasia. Some aspects are discussed in relation to adult aphasia.     

Syntactic determinants of stuttering in the spontaneous speech of normally fluent and stuttering children

Conflicting findings have been reported concerning whether fluent children use more complex syntactic structures than stutterers and whether or not stutterers experience specific difficulty with complex syntactic structures. On critical examination, the first of these apparent discrepancies appears to be due to (a) differences in the methods employed for syntactic analysis in different studies, and (b) misleading impressions gained by looking at speakers within a single age range. Data were reanalyzed where one method of analysis had shown that fluent speakers and stutterers did not differ with regard to syntactic structures used but where they did show a propensity for stuttering to occur on complex syntactic structures. These data cover a range of age groups. When the second method of syntactic analysis was applied, a difference was found between fluent speakers and stutterers, with the stutterers initially using more simple structures and fewer complex ones. This difference decreased over age groups. However, a difference still remained with respect to which syntactic structures stutterers experience difficulty. An additional analysis, not formerly conducted on these data, showed that, as reported elsewhere, there was a higher probability of stuttering on clause-initial and. It was also shown that this tendency decreased with age group of the stutterers.     

The mean fundamental frequency in stutterers and nonstutterers during reading and spontaneous speech

Corresponding to the higher tension of muscles involved in speech production, a higher mean fundamental frequency should be expected in stutterers as compared to nonstutterers. It could be shown by the change scores of the mean fundamental frequency from reading to free conversation that stutterers tend to have a higher fundamental frequency during spontaneous speech.     

Determinants of lexical access in speech production: Role of word frequency and age of acquisition

The main determinants of lexical access in speech are considered to be a word's age of acquisition (AoA) and its frequency of occurrence in a speaker's experience. It is unclear whether and how these variables interact, although they are commonly observed to be correlated, for the few studies that address the issue have reported inconsistent findings. An influential view of AoA in lexical processing (Ellis and Lambon Ralph, 2000) predicts stronger frequency effects for items acquired later in life than for those acquired at an early age. Five experiments were designed to investigate the possible interaction of AoA and frequency effects in speech. We found that the interaction between word frequency and AoA was not robust and that, contrary to expectation, the effect of word frequency was greater for words acquired earlier in life than for those acquired later. The implications of our findings are discussed.     

DiapixUK: task materials for the elicitation of multiple spontaneous speech dialogs

The renewed focus of attention on investigating spontaneous speech samples in speech and language research has increased the need for recordings of speech in interactive settings. The DiapixUK task is a new and extended set of picture materials based on the Diapix task by Van Engen et al. (Language and Speech, 53, 510–540, 2010), where two people are recorded while conversing to solve a ‘spot the difference’ task. The new task materials allow for multiple recordings of the same speaker pairs due to a larger set of picture pairs that have a number of tested features: equal difficulty across all 12 picture pairs, no learning effect of completing more than one picture task and balanced contributions from both speakers. The new materials also provide extra flexibility, making them useful in a wide range of research projects; they are multi-layered electronic images that can be adapted to suit different research needs. This article presents details of the development of the DiapixUK materials, along with data taken from a large corpus of spontaneous speech that are used to demonstrate its new features. Current and potential applications of the task are also discussed.     

An experimental investigation of the modifiability of the temporal structure of spontaneous speech

This study attempted to test the hypothesis that the temporal structure of spontaneous speech is modifiable by reinforcing and punishing pauses, of a certain duration, in an operant conditioning situation. Pause rate was significantly affected by these contingencies: moreover, rate of change was rapid, indicating a prepared association between pausing and such contingencies. This study also attempted to test the hypothesis that there is a class of noncognitive pauses in monologue by punishing UPs to determine if UPs can be eliminated without affecting speech content. Although this manipulation did lead to a decline in pause rate, a significant increase in the amount of filled hesitation, particularly in repetition, resulted. This suggests that the overall amount of hesitation is fixed by the cognitive demands of the task but that a speaker is able to adapt to different interactional contexts by varying the category of hesitation used for cognitive planning.