Chapter 5: Monitoring and Repair

Speakers not only produce speech and listen to one another when conversing,
they also seem to keep one ear open on what they themselves are saying, and if
they catch something amiss, they are quick to amend the mistake and then
continue to converse. The production process sometimes goes awry and speakers
will verbally misstep, especially with irregular or more unusual forms. Almost
always, however, they instantly catch themselves, retreat a step, and correctly
recreate the intended sequence. For example:

- The last I knowed about it {I mean knew about it}, he had left Vancouver.
- She was so drank {I mean drunk}, that we decided to drive her home.

What is self-monitoring?
Self-monitoring is the self-evaluation when Speakers repair errors in their own
speech even when the listener does not give any spoken or visual indication that
they have not understood, and the speakers will repair when producing a
monologue, or in restricted dialogue situations such as on the telephone. At a
high level, speakers may check whether the message that they are expressing is
the one that they want to utter at this stage. Their monitoring may tell them, for
instance, that there is a better or more logical way of organizing the message, or
that they need to explain some key concept before continuing.
Example of Self-Monitoring
...so I arrived in Rome - and - Rome airport is not actually in Rome...
It means, He interrupts what he was saying to add the information
about where Rome airport is, relative to the city itself.
She was so drank – (I mean drunk) -, that we decided to drive her
home.
It means, He interrupts what he was saying to make correction

What is repair
Repair is the process by which a speaker recognizes a speech error and repeats
what has been said with some sort of correction. It is typically involve the
interruption of an erroneous utterance. Also called speech
repair, conversational repair, self-repair, linguistic repair, reparation, false start,
and restart. A linguistic repair may be marked by a hesitation and an editing
term (such as, "I mean") and it sometimes regarded as a type of Dysfluency (the
interruption of the on-going flow of speech (such as, “uh, and um”).

The Structure of Repair

Self-correction in speech results from a complicated interplay of perceptual and
productive processes. In order to make a repair, the speaker must, firstly, notice
some trouble and interrupt his or her flow of speech, and, secondly, create a new
utterance, which takes care of the trouble and its potential consequences for the
listener.Levelt (1983: 41) states that making a self-repair in speech typically
proceeds in three phases.
1. Interruption;The first phase involves the monitoring of one‟s own speech and
the interruption of the flow of speech when trouble is detected. T

2. Editing ;the second is characterized by hesitation, pausing, but especially the

use of so -called editing terms. in this case it is the vocalization uh/

3. Repair ;The third phase consists of making the repair proper. e repair Involves
the correction of an error in what has been said, or revisions of incomplete or
inappropriate utterances.

Different Kinds of Editing Expressions and Their Suggested Functions

-uh, er =Speaker is retrieving something temporarily forgotten.Example: I
saw...uh…twelve people at the party

-that is =Speaker wants to specify a referent, especially one previouslysignalled

only by a pronoun. Example: He hit Mary… that is… Bill did

-(or) rather=Speaker wants to get closer to the intended meaning.Example: I am

trying to lease, or rather, sublease my apartment.

-I mean= Speaker wants to correct an all-out mistake. Example:I beg to present

to you my half- warmed fish, I mean, my half- formed
wish

Repairs and Speech production

Speech monitoring reflect the levels of the production process
-Conceptualization : speakers may check whether the message that they are
expressing is the one that they want to utter at this stage
-Formulation : speakers check that the words they have chosen are the best ones
for what they want to sayChecks may be made that the correct Grammatical
Structures are being used : Morphology and syntax
-Speakers also monitor for errors in pronunciation : segments, prosody stress
assignment.-monitoring for contextual appropriateness

Repair Types:
+Covert repairs is a self-interruption that occurs before the speaker actually
utters the incorrect part of their utterance. Despite its covert nature which
makes it impossible to determine the error, the utterance is marked by hesitation
and repetition . Covert repairs constitute 25% of interruptions(Levelt 1983).

+Overt repairs and revisions are explicit corrections where the error and
repair/revision are available for scrutiny. In overt repairs, the interruption might
take place while the problematic item is being uttered (i.e. within the word),
immediately after it or after a delay of one or more words.

+Delayed repair often occurs at a phrase boundary

The process of Monitoring

The conceptualizer is in charge of both generating messages and monitoring the
whole process of production. In Levelt’s account,speakers make use of their
speech comprehension system to listen to and process their own speech in exactly
the same way they listen to and process the speech of others11. The difference is
that speakers have access to both their COVERT and their overt speech12.

= In the case of covert speech, at an early stage the preverbal plan can be
checked against the speaker’s intention. Later on the process, the articulatory
plan is representable in working memory where it can be checked. In this way
the speaker can detect problems before he or she has articulated an incorrect
item.
=As for overt speech, the audition component of the system recognizes the
articulated words, and the speech comprehension system will retrieve their
meaning. Hence, learners monitor both the meaning and the well-formedness of
their productions.When a problem is detected, several options are available, such
as simply ignoring the problem, revising the preverbal message, or generating a
new message. This will depend on the nature of the problem as well as on other
contextual factors.

For example:
If a speaker wants to produce the utterance “the man gave the woman the
money”, he or she will first pay attention to what he or she wishes to say. He or
she will then select the information he or she needs from his or her encyclopedic
knowledge, and by considering the communicative situation and what has been
said so far. As chunks of the intended conceptual message are decided on, and if
everything goes well, he or she will activate and select the appropriate lemmas
which will construct the surface structure of the utterance and that will point to
the most appropriate word forms. Once each lemma is given a morphological
and phonological form, articulation will begin and overt speech will take place.
Throughout the whole process, the conceptualizer will supervise the message by
checking the pre-verbal plan against the intention, the pre-articulatory plan
against the conceptual plan, and the already uttered message against what was
intended.
Speech Error
SLIP is a speech error elicitation technique inducing sound errors by activating
two incompatible speech plans.The SLIP technique generates spoonerism
repair tasks,SLIP: Spoonerisms of Laboratory-Induced Predisposition. A
spoonerism is a speech error in which the speaker switches the initial consonants
of two consecutive words. If you say "bunny phone" instead of "funny bone,"
you've uttered a spoonerism. "Jelly beans" becomes "belly jeans." Spoonerisms
occur naturally when there is a breakdown of coordination between what
someone wants to say and what is actually said. There is usually some kind of
interference from an outside or inside force. For example, if someone is
distracted by nerves or is thinking about something else while speaking. Or if
while speaking, someone is distracted by something occurring physically around
them.

Paul Georg ‘’What we can learn from slips of the tongue with regard to
psycholinguistics is that: The latter is also shown by the fact that speech errors in
general preserve, for the most part, the word class of the target.’’

How do speakers repair:

Following the editing expression, the speaker initiates a restart. They tend to
restart from a point before the error word.If there is an identical word before the
self-interruption, then they will go back to the last instance of that word.

Now go from the brown dot to the bl . . . to the red dot.

If the first word of the repair differs from anything in the original, then the
repair is taken to be a continuation from the last example of a word from the
same syntactic category

Go up from the red dot . . . down from the red dot to the brown dot.

Structural Constraints on Repair Well-formedness rule (Levelt, 1989 ) :

Repairs appear to be structured syntactically so as to make it as easy as possible

for the listener to follow the utterance. In the case of repairs, the error, or the
complete sentence constituent of which it would have been part, must be able to
form a grammatically complete coordinated structure when
joined with the repair ‘’to the blue dot and to the red dot’’
Revisions of incomplete or inappropriate words or utterances involve a fresh
start, often with a completely new sentence construction.

Monitoring non-words
Results:Reveal the extent and nature of the monitoring that
speakers make their own output.Participants produced a spoonerism 20% of the
time with attested English words ( shot hurt ). Only 6 % when the induced
spoonerism involves non-attested words in English.
A general monitor for real word status simply edits out nonsense word
sequences early and efficiently, but real word sequences pass this general check
and are allowed to proceed. In contrast, when an error correction is performed, it
is equally fast regardless of whether the error would have produced real or
non-words. This implies that the monitoring system performs a phonetic
comparison of the speaker’s articulation plan with the intended output from the
start. As a result, internal monitoring has access to phonetic plan details, which it
evaluates without regard to the lexical status of the output

The immediacy of overt repairs and revisions :

The main interruption rule states that speakers interrupt
themselves immediately when they detect an error.Errors are detected and
repaired much more often when they occur towards the end of a clause.Less
immediate : (51%) of interruptions in overt repairs directly followed the error
word (Levelt, 1983 ),More immediate: 18% involved interruptions within the
error word itself.
Immediate interruption during a word is much more likely if
the word is one that needs repair (what was said was wrong) than if it is one that
needs revision (what was said was incomplete).

Repair with prosodic marking (Levelt & Cutler, 1983 )

Prosodic marking involves the spoken emphasis of the repair word by a change
in pitch, loudness and/or duration. Especially when there is a high degree of
contrast between the error and repair terms.38% repairs of word errors involve
spoken emphasis ;Sound errors tend not to be prosodically marked.Prosodic
marking less likely for revisions.

Implication :Prosodic marking of repairs maximizes the listener’s

understanding of the message.Prosodic marking helps the words in the repair
overwrite the error in the listener’s developing interpretation of the utterance.

Errors in word stress patterns :

n error in a word’s stress pattern is more likely to be repaired if
the misplacement of stress also results in a difference in the
vowels in the word (Vowel Quality)Stress pair: Two words with the same spelling
(homographs) and largely the same pronunciation, but a contrasting stress
pattern.63% of lexical stress errors are corrected if they cause a change in vowel
quality.Only 23% are corrected if they do not (Cutler & Clifton, 1984 ).
Repairs from word stress patterns ensures the correctidentification of words by
the listener.

.EDITOR THEORY
The finding that speakers monitor their own speech and correct it as they go
shows that an editing process takes place during speech production. The precise
nature of the editor has been a source of contention. Is it, for example, a
mechanism designed specifically for self-monitoring and editing of the speaker’s
own output? This would imply that self-monitoring
is a distinct aspect of the speech production process, possibly involving the
speaker in a comparison of what they said to what they intended.
The precise nature of the editor has been an issue of some debate.Self-monitoring
is a special part of the speech production
process geared to self-monitoring and to the editing of the
speaker’s own output.speakers compare what they said with what they
intendedOR:self-monitoring implements a more general monitoring device used
in speech production and comprehension .It does not refer to speakers intentions
but subject to more general criteria: lexical legitimacy, syntactic and semantic
appropriacy, situational context, and social appropriateness

The Perceptual Loop Theory (PLT): (Levelt1983, 1989)

Three loops for inspecting the outcome of processes:

The conceptual loop: The preverbal message is compared to the original

intentions of the speaker. The appropriacy of the message in the given
communicative context that is checked.

The prearticulatory loop: The outcome of the phonological processes is checked

with encoding errors intercepted before articulation.

The external loop of monitoring: The articulated message is parsed. , the speaker
inspects both communicative appropriacy and the linguistic form
of the utterance.

The nature of monitoring :

The majority of repaired spoonerisms in these tasks are very quick,
with an interruption very early in the error, arguably much earlier than would be
compatible with monitoring and responding to actual spoken output. Is this
interruption and repair in response to the speaker’s own lexical or phonetic
monitoring? Is the repair a reaction to the realization that the output is not the
word the speaker intended (or even a word at all), or does it result from a
comparison of the actual sounds produced with the target sounds?

Arguments in favor of Lexical monitoring :

Experimentally induced error are more likely to be interrupted

when they result in a nonword.Sound errors tend to result in real words more
often than non-words.induced spoonerisms are more likely to be completed if
they result in real words ( shot hurt ) than if they result in a nonsense sequence (
sheel helf ).

● A general monitor for real word :

At a preliminary stage only real words tend to proceed.

Non-words are filtered by a general monitor for real words.Internal monitoring
has access to details of the phonetic plan Error corrections are fast.The
monitoring system also makes a phonetic comparison of the
speaker’s articulation plan with the intended output

Higher-level monitoring :
Monitoring for the appropriateness of the output takes longer.Results from the
taboo word experiment: When the sponnerism would result in a taboo word in
thE sequence pair.

+The first word is a taboo word fits tall → tits fall

+The second word is a taboo word tool kits → cool tits ).

Results : Partial rather than full spoonerisms were far more

likely in the latter case (cool kits ),Why?Speakers managed to filter out the taboo
word thanks tothe delay

The Function of repair

+Repairing processes are geared towards making interpretation easier for
listeners with The use of editing expressions to signal that a repair is taking place.
+Structured repair subject to well-formedness conditions.
+Perceptual constraints on production
+Speakers do not apply connected speech processes such as platalisation if the
second word is not frequent.
+To ease the listeners’ understanding speakers tend to pronounce words with
greater clarity words that are new in the discourse.
+Speak less clearly words that convey people, objects or previously mentioned
ideas.
+Speakers monitor their syntax to ease comprehension