Theories of monitoring and the timing of repairs in spontaneous speech

This study reports the first data to be published on the timing of self-repairs in spontaneous speech, giving means and confidence intervals for cut-off-to repair, error-to-repair, and cut-off-to-repair times for different types of repair based on 1525 repairs made in the conversational turns of 61 callers to a radio talk show. The three most detailed models of monitoring are discussed in the introduction, with emphasis on their temporal implications. Many of the cut-off-to-repair times observed were faster than would be predicted by any model in the Literature. Laver's (1980) theory of monitoring is shown to be incongruent with the observed times, as is Levelt's (1983, 1989) main interruption rule. The results show that people can plan corrections to their speech while talking, and suggest that Kempen and Hoenkamp's (1987) concept of incremental processing can be extended to repairs.