In:Above and Beyond the Segments: Experimental linguistics and phonetics
Edited by Johanneke Caspers, Yiya Chen, Willemijn Heeren, Jos Pacilly, Niels O. Schiller and Ellen van Zanten
[Not in series 189] 2014
► pp. 203–217
Do speakers try to distract attention from their speech errors? The prosody of self-repairs
Published online: 10 December 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.189.17noo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.189.17noo
Self-repairs of segmental speech errors come in two varieties: repairs of early
and of late-detected errors. Early-detected errors are detected in inner, late
detected errors in overt speech. Late-detected errors are those in which the
word or phrase containing the error is completed before the repair is made.
We made acoustic measurements of both the reparandum and the repair, and
also ran a loudness judgment experiment on pairs of CV fragments excised
from reparandum and repair. Repairs of early-detected errors but not of latedetected
errors had shorter durations, higher intensity, pitch and subjective
loudness than those from the corresponding reparandums. It is concluded that
speakers tend to distract the listeners’ attention from early but not from latedetected
errors.
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