Hugo Quené of Utrecht University will give an in-person colloquium.
Self-monitoring of speech sound errors
Speech sound errors provide valuable insights into how speakers mentally prepare their speech, and how speakers monitor their own planning and performance while speaking. In this talk I will address several hypotheses about the detection of phonetic/phonological speech (sound) errors:
– speech errors may be detected relatively early or relatively late, capturing different stages of mental preparation of speech; moreover the self-monitoring processes involved in these two types of detection are qualitatively different;
– detection of one’s own speech errors is affected by the degree of phonetic contrast between the target and the error: larger contrast will lead to more frequent and more rapid detection;
– repairs of detected speech sound errors stem from competing (word and/or sound) candidates during mental preparation of speech.
These hypotheses were investigated using data from two sources: (1) elicited Dutch sound errors from several experiments involving phonological priming (using the SLIP technique), as well as (2) a sample of spontaneous English sound errors from the Simon Fraser University Speech Error Database (SFUSED, English part).
The combined results suggest that, importantly, sound errors that were detected early seem to be categorical, without any trace of the intended speech sound, whereas sound errors detected late seem to be more gradient. In turn, this suggests that speakers have different mental representations of their speech plan in the early vs. late stages of mental preparation of speech.
