Examining Hesitation

After our discussion in class about the blogs, I thought I would expand on a topic I blogged about earlier instead of writing about a new one. Specifically, the topic that most interested me was about the mental processes involved in putting thoughts into words [see “The Science of Slip-ups”].

To understand what our mind does in the process, researchers analyze our speech patterns. For example, studying hesitations in speech teaches us more about psychological processing time. There are four different kinds of hesitations:

1. Pauses: further divided into filled (vocalized) and unfilled (silent) pauses
2. False starts: utterance begun and then abandoned
3. Restarts: utterance begun and restarted
4. Word lengthening: enunciation of word is stretched out past normal length

How and when a speaker hesitates in his speech reflects the psycholinguistic operations of speech production; some researchers have theorized that “hesitation pauses correspond to points of highest statistical uncertainty in the sequencing of units.” That is, the more information that is to be contained in the words to follow, the longer it takes us to put those words into speech (not surprisingly). Furthermore, hesitation pauses occur more frequently before content words instead of function words (content words are generally nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, while function words serve to express grammatical relationships with other words). This suggests that there would be differences in hesitations between a native speaker of a language and a person who has learned it as a second language (apart from the natural differences in hesitation due to the native speaker’s obviously greater fluency!) The grammar of a language is so engrained in a native speaker’s mind that he can apply it automatically; it is the words that are more difficult, because they inherently contain more ideas—it takes longer for these words to go through the stages of processing in the mind.

To summarize, these stages are:

Semantic stage: Meaning is generated
Syntactic stage: Syntactic structure is decided upon.
Lexical stage: Content words are extracted from lexicon to give shape to the developing sentence
Prosodic stage: Appropriate intonation pattern is decided upon
Phonological stage: Function words are inserted at key points in the emerging sentence structure
Phonetic System stage: Concrete sounds formulated, muscle activation commences

The hesitations reinforce this idea of the stages of processing: the insertion of function words comes later, when there is less work to be done so speech can ensue.

Researcher Brian Butterworth did further research dealing not just with individual hesitations, but the overall proportion of hesitations to speech. What he found was that there was a mathematical relationship between fluent phases (periods marked by predominant phonation) and hesitant prases (periods marked by predominant silence); he theorized that “the amount of speech in the fluent phrase required the planning time given by the pausing in the hesitant phase.” What I was interested to learn, but couldn’t find, however, was whether the hesitant phases differed in any significant way from the fluent phases; that is, were there more weighty ideas being conveyed in the hesitant phases, which would require greater thinking and planning? Or conversely, were there more weighty ideas being conveyed in the fluent phase, which required planning during the time period before its utterance (during the hesitant phase)?


http://www.springerlink.com/content/m75161152410247g/fulltext.pdf

http://books.google.com/booksid=8yF0Z2sO0oC&pg=PA536&lpg=PA536&dq=hesitation+linguist+filled&source=web&ots=aX-PpFkniI&sig=ZgclOkUZYH2Lwj0DY-UPy-DcJjE#PPA536,M1

http://www.gpwu.ac.jp/~rose/fprc/Definition.htm

http://banana.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/transcription/intro.html

http://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk/speech-errors.html