Informativeness, Timing and Tempo in Lexical Self-Repair

Abstract

This paper presents a study of the temporal organization of lexical repair in spontaneous Dutch speech. It assesses the extent to which offset-to-repair duration and repair tempo can be predicted on the basis of offset timing, reparandum tempo and measures of the informativeness of the crucial lexical items in the repair. Specifically, we address the expectations that repairs that are initiated relatively early are produced relatively fast throughout, and that relatively highly informative repairs are produced relatively slowly. For informativeness, we implement measures based on repair semantics, lexical frequency counts and cloze probabilities. Our results highlight differences between factual and linguistic error repairs, which have not been consistently distinguished in previous studies, and provide some evidence to support the notion that repairs that are initiated relatively early are produced relatively fast. They confirm that lexical frequency counts are rough measures of contextual predictability at best, and reveal very few significant effects of our informativeness measures on the temporal organization of lexical self-repair. Moreover, although we can confirm that most repairs have a repair portion that is fast relative to its reparandum, this cannot be attributed to the relative informativeness of the two portions. Our findings inform the current debate on the division of labour between inner and overt speech monitoring, and suggest that, although the influence of informativeness on speech production is extensive, it is not ubiquitous.