| Abstract: | This paper presents a cognitive theory on the production and shaping of self-repairs during speaking. In an extensive experimental study, a new technique is tried out: artificial elicitation of self-repairs. The data clearly indicate that two mechanisms for computing the shape of self-repairs should be distinguished. One is based on the repair strategy called reformulation, the second one on lemma substitution. W. Levelt's (1983, Cognition, 14, 41–104) well-formedness rule, which connects self-repairs to coordinate structures, is shown to apply only to reformulations. In case of lemma substitution, a totally different set of rules is at work. The linguistic unit of central importance in reformulations is the major syntactic constituent; in lemma substitutions it is a prosodie unit, the phonological phrase. A parametrization of the model yielded a very satisfactory fit between observed and reconstructed scores. © 1987 Academic Press, Inc. |
