Bayview Beach Resort, Batu Ferringhi Beach, Penang, Malaysia

27-30 September 1999

Characteristic Features of Planning of Speech and Production
of Secondary School Children's Spontaneous Speech

Mária Laczkó

Gyál, Tinódi, Hungary

Abstract

The process of spontaneous speech is characterized by two categories like this: i) planning of speech (i.e. encoding); ii) production of speech (i.e. decoding). In Levelt's theory before the speaker starts talking he/she has to decide the goal of his/her speech and plan the actual topic which is about to speak, but in the second part of planning process they have to decide and choose among the appropriate linguistic forms and structures (and sometimes paralinguistics instruments) to express their thoughts or emotions. Consequently in spontaneous speech time is not filled continuously, interruptions may occur in the process or speech may be mixed with intermittent periods of non speech. According to a lot of experimental results the great number of various errors of the speaker's planning process can occur in spontaneous speech like these: incomplete/self interrupted utterances, changing of subject of the given utterance, unexpected complement in the utterance, false starts, grammatical errors, repetitions, back references and over comdenses of the given thoughts. It has also been established that pauses are of crucial importance in spontaneous speech, because they indicate something about the process of encoding and decoding of the speaker. Although pauses basically have linguistic functions, experiments have also shown a close interrelation of pauses and mental process.

The latest research of Hungarian spontaneous speech has been based on examination of various planning strategy of the speakers and their speech tempo categories and pauses and the interrelation between them in adults' spontaneous speech process. As a result of the research it has been found the close interrelation between tempo categories and pauses as the working process of speech planning and mental lexicon on the one hand, and consequently the important role of pauses in the speech production and speech understanding processes on the other.

These phenomena have primarily been explored by analysing adult speech. Hardly any data are available concerning the features of spontaneous speech of children especially of secondary school students. In most of the cases their linguistic skills can only be judged impressionistically. On the basis of these judgements it is a well known fact that there is a great number of pupils who are able to express themselves only with difficulties although there are some who can speak easily without any problems. However there is no experimentally supported knowledge concerning the effect of adolescents' speech planning process on their production. In this paper we analyse adolescents' speech production by comparing their use of planning strategies in terms of hesitation phenomena occuring in their spontaneous speech and their spontaneous speech and their articulation rates and pauses. Our preliminary assumption was that students with a weak ability of speech as a poor linguistic skill is characterized by more pauses and hesitation phenomena occurring in their speech because the poor speaker does planning process can frequently appear in the second part of it as in the production. Furthermore we try to discuss: i) whether it is possible to demonstrate the existence of any interrelation between articulation rate and pauses in their spontaneous speech in terms of their ability of speech as a characteristic feature; ii) can articulete rate and hesitation phenomena be used as objective indicators of their linguistic skill. A series of experiments has been carried out with the participation of secondary school students as 'good' and 'poor' speakers. In order to discuss the questions mentioned above 5-5 minutes of spontaneous speech samples of 17 year old students (number of them was 10) were recorded for analyses.