Social Goals and Speech Production: Effects of Multiple Goals on Pausal Phenomena

Abstract

There is a current widespread recognition that communication involves the production and processing of messages aimed at accomplishing multiple social goals. Despite this, it remains to discover how people design and implement such messages. The research reported here was undertaken to examine various temporal and content features of multiple-goal messages on the assumption that these features are essential to the development of theory in this domain. The speech of participants given a great number of social goals was contrasted with that of participants assigned the task of pursuing fewer goals. Messages developed in pursuit of more goals were found to be characterised by slower speech onset latency, longer message duration, more frequent use of sociocentric sequences, and a higher rate of ideational repetitions. The effects of construct differentiation on these variables were also examined, but proved to have little effect on the message features of interest.