Automatic Speech - Characteristics of Automatic Speech - Linguistic Features - Syntax

Syntax

Automatic Speech is more likely to occur at the beginning of utterance or phrase and the reason is because it is presumed that there is a greater demand on planning processes at these junctures. Features of automatic speech, like filled pauses or repetitions, are most likely to occur immediately prior to the onset of a complex syntactic constituent. Filled pauses are also likely after the initial word in a complex constituent, especially after function words. Therefore, listeners might be able to use the presence of a recent filled pause to predict that an ambiguous structure, and this trait is in favor of a more complex analysis .

There are several different types of automatic speech. One type is relatively universal, often transcending differences in language and to some degree culture. Simple fillers like “Uhm,” “Uh,” or “Er” are used by many different people in many different settings. For the most part, these types of fillers are considered innocuous, and are often overlooked by listeners, as long as they are not utilized so often that they overshadow the remainder of the conversation.

Other forms of automatic speech are ingrained within specific cultures, and in fact are sometimes considered an identifying characteristic of people who share a particular religion, or live in a specific geographical region. Along with accents, automatic speech of this type is sometimes considered colorful and somewhat entertaining. Writers often make use of this type of speech to give the characters in their writings additional personality, helping to make them unique.

Fluency

The study conducted by Dechert (1980) that investigated the speech performance of a German student of English revealed that there is a tendency for speech pauses to be situated at breaks that are consistent with “episodic units”. Dechert (1980) found that the more fluent utterances exhibited more pauses at those junctures and lesser within the "episodic units", leading him to posit that the study subject was able to use the narrative structure to pace his own speech with natural breaks in order for him to scout for the words and phrases that are to follow subsequently.

Through the comparison of the story retelling utterances collated of second language learners, Lennon (1984) discovered notable disparities in the distribution of pauses between recounting in the research subjects’ first and second languages respectively. The study found that all of the pauses were found to be located either at clause breaks or following nonintegral components of the clause, without pauses within the clauses. On the other hand, the narrators who spoke using their second language exhibited different patterns, with a higher frequency of pauses occurring within the clauses, leading to the conclusion posited by Lennon to be that the speakers seem to be “planning within clauses as well as in suprasegmental units”, and hence, the occurrence of pauses within clauses and not at the intersection of clauses could well be an indicator distinguishing fluent and confluent speech.