The use of prosody in highlighting alterations in repairs from unrestricted speech

A speaker has several ways in which he or she may highlight the fact that an error or imprecision of speech has been made and subsequently altered. The three principal ones are by signalling through the structure of the speech that surrounds the error (the repair-syntax), by the use of prosody, and through the semantic content. The role of prosody in the correction process is investigated in the current studies. Analysis of the prosody of a number of errors and their alterations drawn from unrestricted speech are reported. The analysis shows that pauses occur at the moment of interruption and that an increase in stress occurs at the start of the alteration. Pauses could indicate the moment of interruption, and stress could highlight what has been altered. Two sets of perceptual experiments were carried out to assess whether these cues are salient for listeners who hear constructions containing an error and its alteration. Two paradigms were employed in each set of experiments: (1) direct judgement about the comprehensibility of sentences containing errors and alterations, and (2) repeating a message that had an error and alteration without the error. The effects of stress and pauses on (Experiments 1A and 1B) or pauses around (Experiment 2A and 2B) the alterations were assessed. In the first set of experiments it was shown that pauses and stress help listeners process repairs. When a word is spoken in error, the speaker may repeat a section of speech immediately preceding the alteration and/or a section immediately following that word. Inclusion of these repeated sections allows assessment of whether pauses signal where the interruption occurred. The second experiment shows that the placing of the pause before the retrace, rather than at other locations, indicates to listeners where the repair starts.