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.
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.