Is repairing speech errors an automatic or a controlled process? Insights from the relationship between error and repair probabilities in English and Spanish

ABSTRACT

Speakers can correct their speech errors, but the mechanisms behind repairs are still unclear. Some findings, such as the speed of repairs and speakers’ occasional unawareness of them, point to an automatic repair process. This paper reports a finding that challenges a purely automatic repair process. Specifically, we show that as error rate increases, so does the proportion of repairs. Twenty highly-proficient English-Spanish bilinguals described dynamic visual events in real time (e.g. “The blue bottle disappears behind the brown curtain”) in English and Spanish blocks. Both error rates and proportion of corrected errors were higher on (a) noun phrase (NP)2 vs. NP1, and (b) word1 (adjective in English and noun in Spanish) vs. word2 within the NP. These results show a consistent relationship between error and repair probabilities, disentangled from position, compatible with a model in which greater control is recruited in error-prone situations to enhance the effectiveness of repair.

KEYWORDS:

• Speech errors
• monitoring
• repair
• cognitive control
• bilingualism
• sentence production
• semantic interference
• incremental planning

Acknowledgment

We thank Michael Freund for his help with data collection. This work was supported in part by the NSF grant 1631993 awarded to N.N., and in part by the Therapeutic Cognitive Neuroscience Fund endowed to the Cognitive Neurology division of the Neurology Department at Johns Hopkins University. C.D. Martin was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (SEV-2015-490; PSI2017-82941-P; Europa-Excelencia ERC2018-092833) and the Basque Government (PIBA18-29).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data corpus used in this paper is currently being analysed for (a) testing the predictions of an implemented computational model of speech repairs, and (b) the effects directly related to bilingualism. Once those analyses are completed and their results are submitted for publication, the data will be made publicly available. In the meantime, they are available upon request.

ORCID

Nazbanou Nozari http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2215-8533

Notes

1 This correlation is also negative in English (r = −.27) but does not reach significance (p = .25) most likely because of the smaller variability in the number of errors made in English across subjects.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the NSF grant 1631993 awarded to N.N., and in part by the Therapeutic Cognitive Neuroscience Fund endowed to the Cognitive Neurology division of the Neurology Department at Johns Hopkins University. C.D. Martin was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (SEV-2015-490; PSI2017-82941-P; Europa-Excelencia ERC2018-092833) and the Basque Government (PIBA18-29).