| Abstract |
| The issue in this paper was whether
attending to acoustic elements and to message elements in a speech signal were compatible
operations. In four experiements Ss listened for pauses and other hesitation
phenomena in spontaneous speech; in three the task was reproduction of heard speech to
include hesitations; in one the task was simply the marking of heard hesitations on
transcripts. Experimental variables were instructions, degree of
"ungrammaticality" of hesitations in speech inputs, time interval between
listening and reproduction, and task manipulations along a continuum between simple
hesitation detection and hesitation detection plus simultaneous speech decoding.
Results were: (1) In all experiments Ss displaced within-constituent hesitations to
constituent boundaries, suggesting a grammatical organization between input and
output. (2) Instructional set to reproduce hesitations increased hesitations and
words but at the expense of per cent words correct, suggesting that attending to acoustic
elements such as hesitations was an interfering task during speech decoding. (3) The
hesitaiton shift persisted in the hesitation-marking task when simultaneous speech
decoding was required by the nature of the task, indicating that speaking (encoding)
characteristics may not completely account for the shift. (4) The distribution of
hesitation marking errors toward grammatical organization seemed to require an account in
terms of perceptual processes during listening. |
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