Hesitation Phenomena
Introduction Hesitation phenomena is one of two types of pauses that occur during our speech and the other type is breathing pauses. Although hesitation does not have a linguistic function, it plays a role in the study of speech production and speech planning. There are three main categories of hesitation: 1- silent pauses, 2- filled pauses, which composes of non-linguistic or non-lexical vocalizations and the most common ones are: umm, ah and er. 3- speech disturbances such as slips of the tongue, stuttering, repeating, omitting or repairing speech.
Psycholinguists have paid special attention as to where these pauses -whether silent or filled- occur in our speech. Some studies- like the one conducted by Boomer 1965- found that pauses are more frequent after the first word in the phonemic clause. On the other hand, some studies found that most pauses occur before important lexical words. Even though the findings of these studies goes to different directions, it has one thing in common that it suggest that speech planning and speech production are processes that happen in a parallel manner.
In this experiment subjects are asked to perform tasks on speaking spontaneously and reading aloud as well as talking about a concrete object and an abstract concept. All topics are determined by the experiment conductors. The aim of this experiment is to ascertain whether the frequency of hesitation is higher in one of the tasks and to find whether hesitation occurs mostly in clauses or between them.
Subjects All subjects participants in this experiment are undergraduate females ages 20-24 and speak English as a second language. Experiments conducted on 5 subjects.
Methods :
We 've applied our experiments systematically putting in considerations the rules we must follow in order to get clear results.
First of all we 've chosen three different topics for our experiments :
( Reading aloud Vs Spontaneous speech ):1
• We
Psycholinguists have paid special attention as to where these pauses -whether silent or filled- occur in our speech. Some studies- like the one conducted by Boomer 1965- found that pauses are more frequent after the first word in the phonemic clause. On the other hand, some studies found that most pauses occur before important lexical words. Even though the findings of these studies goes to different directions, it has one thing in common that it suggest that speech planning and speech production are processes that happen in a parallel manner.
In this experiment subjects are asked to perform tasks on speaking spontaneously and reading aloud as well as talking about a concrete object and an abstract concept. All topics are determined by the experiment conductors. The aim of this experiment is to ascertain whether the frequency of hesitation is higher in one of the tasks and to find whether hesitation occurs mostly in clauses or between them.
Subjects All subjects participants in this experiment are undergraduate females ages 20-24 and speak English as a second language. Experiments conducted on 5 subjects.
Methods :
We 've applied our experiments systematically putting in considerations the rules we must follow in order to get clear results.
First of all we 've chosen three different topics for our experiments :
( Reading aloud Vs Spontaneous speech ):1
• We
References: Aichitson Jean – The articulate Mammal – Fifth edition Fox Tree, J. E. (1995). The effects of false starts and repetitions on the processing of subsequent words in spontaneous speech. Journal of Memory and Language, 34,709.738 http://hourglass.rskrose.com/archives/5 Sophia University – A study by Hede Helfrich ----------------------- Hesitation Phenomena Reading Aloud VS Speaking Spontaneously Concrete VS Abstract