Hesitation phenomena: a dynamical perspective

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to test if hesitation phenomena are periodically distributed in spoken language production. Twenty semi-spontaneous descriptions and narratives produced by five healthy male adults were examined in a multiple case study design. Speech was sampled at a 200 ms rate for time series generation. Fourier analysis indicated that all time series were statistically stationary, which means that speech did not become more or less fluent along each sample. Fourier analysis identified periodic cycles of hesitations in all speech samples. Therefore, hesitations were not randomly distributed in speech production; intervals with more occurrences of hesitations regularly alternated with intervals with fewer occurrences. Thus, hesitations behaved as stable phenomena that could be anticipated. The median and the mean lengths of hesitation cycles were about 9 and 13 s, respectively. It is suggested that macroplanning activities (selecting and ordering information) are language processes compatible with this time scale. Three hesitation cycles were usually identified in each sample, suggesting that spoken language processing occurs in parallel within working memory, with the resources being shared by different processes.

Effects of age and dementia on temporal cycles in spontaneous speech fluency

“…In the Henderson method plot shown in Figure 1, the first cycle begins with about 11 seconds of relatively fluent speech (including the shorter hesitant portions within those 11 seconds), and ends with about 13 seconds of relatively hesitant speech (including the shorter fluent portions within those 13 seconds), for a total first cycle of about 24 seconds. For healthy individuals, average temporal cycles have been generally found to range from 10 to 30 seconds (Beattie, 1980; Butterworth & Goldman-Eisler, 1979; Henderson et al, 1966; Levelt, 1989; Merlo & Barbosa, 2010; Roberts & Kirsner, 2000). …”

“…The task used by Greene and Capella (1986) in which the subjects were instructed to speak on a predefined topic (an argument in support of a proposal for a congressional bill) is somewhat similar to the picture description task used in the current study in terms of single topic maintenance. However, the task that was closest to the one reported in this paper was used by Merlo and Barbosa (2010) who also utilized time series analysis to successfully identify periodicity in temporal cycles in Brazilian Portuguese for 5 healthy adult males. The frequency of the cycles reported by Merlo and Barbosa (2010) ranged between 9 and 13 seconds.…”

“…However, the task that was closest to the one reported in this paper was used by Merlo and Barbosa (2010) who also utilized time series analysis to successfully identify periodicity in temporal cycles in Brazilian Portuguese for 5 healthy adult males. The frequency of the cycles reported by Merlo and Barbosa (2010) ranged between 9 and 13 seconds.…”

Participatory Framework Invoked by Processing-Motivated Filler Zhege (‘This-CL’) in Chinese Conversations: An Embodied Perspective

“…The sources of challenges pertain to various aspects of spontaneous production, mainly including speakers' uncertainty (Barr, 2001;Smith & Clark, 1993), conceptualization of new information (Arnold, Fagnano, & Tanenhaus, 2003), formulation of major, long or complex discourse units (Barr, 2001;Beattie, 1979;Boomer, 1965), lexical-retrieval or word-search difficulty (Brennan & Williams, 1995;Schachter, Christenfeld, Ravina, & Bilous, 1991;Levelt & Cutler, 1983;Butterworth, 1979;Goldman-Eisler, 1968). These challenges are constantly present, posing trouble to on-line processing so that fillers as well as other hesitation phenomena may be anticipatable in spontaneous talk (Merlo & Barbosa, 2010). …”

Language acquisition: hesitations in the question/answer dialogic pair

“…In a fourth set of studies, the focus turns to what their authors define as the temporal behavior of hesitations. Although their investigations have been conducted among adults, it calls for attention, in the studies resulting from these investigations, to the fact that their authors do not address hesitation as something that characterizes the disfluency (12,13) . Also notable in these studies is the conclusion reached by the authors -that hesitations and pauses would act together to maintain fluency (13) .…”