PLANNING: SPEECH

Although speech appears to be spontaneous, it requires a planning process in which the components (clauses, words, phonemes) are assembled. Critical to the process are pauses in the flow of speech, which enable a speaker to construct a new chunk of language. When experimenters force speakers to suppress pausing, it results in confused and sometimes incoherent discourse.

In some types of monologue, researchers have demonstrated a pattern where hesitant phases of speech (marked by frequent and longer pausing) alternate with more fluent ones. The hesitant phases have been interpreted in terms of the speaker elaborating goals and retrieving information while the shorter and less frequent pauses of the fluent phases appear to allow the speaker to finalise the form of words. Eye contact is maintained during about 50 per cent of the fluent phase but 20 per cent of the hesitant phase.

 Evidence for a unit of planning has been sought in pausing, in speech errors, in intonation patterns and in the gestures which accompany speech. Pauses tend to come at or near clause boundaries, suggesting that the clause is a major unit of planning. This is supported by evidence from Slips of the Tongue, in which most word misplacements take place within a single clause.

 Speech planning can be conceived as taking place at a number of levels. In Levelt’s (1989) model, ideas are first shaped through conceptualisation. This involves two stages. Macroplanning breaks the communicative goal into a series of subgoals and retrieves the information necessary to realise these goals. Microplanning involves attaching the right propositional structure to each of these chunks of information, and taking account of where the focus of information is to lie. The outcome of the conceptualising process is an abstract preverbal message.

This is followed by a stage termed formulation, which first constructs the message in abstract terms, setting up a syntactic framework, and tagging the framework for inflections and rhythm. The plan is then given concrete phonemic and syllabic form. Phonetic planning prepares the message for articulation by specifying the relative length of each syllable and incorporating co-articulation; and prosodic planning allocates intonation and determines speech rate. The outcome of these operations is an articulatory plan, stored in the form of a set of instructions to the articulators (jaw, tongue, vocal cords etc.).

 See also: Buffer, Speech production

 Further reading: Levelt (1989: Chaps 8–10)

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