A Study Of Self-Monitoring In Verbal Communication

Verbal self-monitoring is an important issue in the research field of speech production.The study of self-monitoring in the process of verbal communication is not only theoretically important to understand the true face of the human language production system,but also practically important to help the interlocutors improve the quality of their speech output so as to successfully realize their communicative intentions.At present,the research on the self-monitoring of speech is still in its infancy in China.There are more theoretical introductions but fewer empirical researches.A comprehensive and in-depth study of self-monitoring in Chinese natural discourse is more rarely seen.This thesis,based on the authentic naturally-occurring corpus data garnered by the author herself,explores the problem of self-monitoring in the spontaneous Mandarin Chinese speech from the perspective of disfluencies in daily verbal communication.The nature of the online processing of spontaneous speech determines that people’s oral output in daily communication is far from perfect,and therefore often gives rise to speech errors.Fortunately,in most cases the speaker can inspect his own trouble and make the appropriate adjustments without being reminded by his interlocutor.Such phenomenon proves that the speaker has the ability to monitor his language production processes.The existence of verbal self-monitoring mechanism allows the speaker to spontaneously use the systems of speech comprehension and production to effectively inspect and regulate their speech production,so as to guarantee the quality of their verbal output.When the speaker detects his speech errors and decides to repair them,the internal self-monitoring process can be shown openly as a variety of speech disfluencies,including interruption,filled pause,unfilled pause,repetition,substitution,insertion and restart.The above-mentioned speech disfluencies thus provide a feasible research path for us to examine the internal verbal self-monitoring process.Follow this way of thinking,we select 120 Mandarin Chinese users at different levels in terms of gender,age and education as the subjects of this research.The speech disfluencies for the current project are collected from a corpus of these subjects’ audios and telephone calls in daily life.On the basis of the analysis of the speech disfluencies,the current study aims to explore the self-monitoring behavior in verbal communication.Our discussion and analysis mainly include the following:First,verbal self-monitoring takes on the characteristics of metacognition.In essence,metacognition involves the ability to plan,monitor,evaluate and regulate one’s own cognitive activities.Metacognitive monitoring is divided into two stages: inspecting and regulating.The cognitive subject inspects and regulates their cognitive activities in this process.The whole process of speech production is fully conformed to the features of the metacognitive self-monitoring and self-regulating.In the speech-inspecting phase,the speaker will check whether his inner and overt speech meet their communicative intention or meet their general language knowledge standards.In the speech-regulating phase,the speaker will timely adjust their speech acts after detecting the trouble.Therefore,we have reason to hold that verbal self-monitoring is the metacognitive experiences of the speaker’s self-inspecting and self-regulating of his speech production.Secondly,the process of verbal self-monitoring involves self-inspecting and self-regulating.The verbal self-monitoring mechanism has two main functions: one is to match the current state of speech with the ideal state;the other is to issue the instructions for adjustments.These two functions correspond to the two stages of self-inspecting and self-regulating of verbal speech self-monitoring.Thirdly,in the first phase of verbal self-monitoring,speech interruption is a sign that shows the speaker’s self-inspecting is in an active state.Different interruption points represent different levels of self-inspecting activation.In terms of overt monitoring,the self-inspecting activation level of the speaker follows the order from high to low: within-word interruption > immediate interruption > delayed interruption.The nature of the trouble source has an effect on the distribution of the interruption points.The speaker’s verbal self-monitoring mechanism is more sensitive to errors than inappropriateness in his speech output,leading to the high frequency of within-word interruption of the speech errors.In contrast,the speed of detecting the inappropriateness is generally slower.The length of the speech errors also affects the distribution of speech interruption points.With the increase in the number of syllables of the trouble source,the number of within-word interruption is on the rise.The distribution of filled pauses and the length of unfilled pauses are affected by the complexity of cognitive tasks.Pauses(both filled and unfilled pauses)play an important role in the process of verbal self-monitoring.On the one hand,pauses may reflect the speaker’s self-perception of speech errors;on the other hand,the entire suspension process conveys the speaker’s intention to indicating self-repair,keeping the turn and re-planning speech.Fourthly,in the second phase of verbal self-monitoring,the speaker will self-regulate the information that does not meet his or her communication intention.Repetition,substitution,insertion and restart are the dominant strategies of self-regulation.Self-repetition is covert regulation for the trouble source cannot be observed;and substitution,insertion and restart belong to overt regulation.Self-repetition is a cognitive strategy commonly used by the speaker in order to solve the problem of speech production.In the form of distribution,single-word repetition appears at the highest frequency,followed by double-words repetition and multiple-words repetition,thus reflecting the economic principle of language.Self-repetition performs the cognitive functions of delaying speech output and recovering speech flow,which manifests the speaker’s psychological process of solving the internal problems of his speech.Substitution is the main way for the speaker to carry out overt self-regulation.The speaker often follows the category-identity convention and tries to preserve the integrity of the sentence structure.In view of backward trajectory,the most common type is the substitution accompanied by repetition.From the perspective of verbal interaction,the speaker tends to adopt the substitution with the repetition,partly because the repetition of some of the preceding words without errors enables the speaker to seek a relatively long time to adjust their speech plan;and partly because this practice can provide the listener with a clue that links the replacement with the previous discourse so as to help the listener solve the problem of the continuity of discourse.In addition to substitution,the overt self-regulating also includes the insertion.In the form of structure,the inserted item can be words,phrases,clauses,complex sentences,or sentence groups.With regard to the regulating function,the speaker can adopt the insertion to adjust the proposition content of the preceding discourse.In addition,Insertion can also perform the social function to alleviate the face threatening acts and narrow the psychological distance between the interlocutors.Finally it can also adjust the rhythm of the discourse.In spontaneous speech production,the speaker is always trying to find the best form of expression to convey their own communicative intentions,even if it is to restart.Restart often leads to changes in syntactic structure,suggesting that syntactic patterns are not always pre-formulated in natural speech production.On the contrary,in the process of verbal communication,the speaker makes a constant attempt to adjust the structure of the discourse in order to connect the most appropriate form of utterance to his communicative intentions.Fifthly,we find that gender,age,educational level and way of communication have a certain influence on the verbal self-monitoring behavior of the speaker.In terms of gender,men and women have their own tendencies in the choice of regulative strategies.Men focus more attention on covert monitoring and regulate their internal speech through self-repetition;female speakers are more concerned with the appropriateness of their expression,and thus employ more regulative strategies of appropriateness to adjust their speech.It is held that the gender differences in the brain structure as well as the psychological characteristics of both sexes have a certain impact on the verbal self-monitoring.When it comes to age factor,it is found that the speaker’s verbal self-monitoring ability gradually decline with age.The timely monitoring ability of the elderly group is significantly lower than that of the middle-aged group and the young group.The elderly group prefers to use more repetition and restart to adjust their speech when measured against the middle-aged group and the young group.The decline in the general cognitive ability of the elderly leads to the decline of their verbal self-monitoring ability.Education is another influencing factor.The speakers of the lower education group have made more error corrections while those of the higher education group tend to make more appropriate adjustments to their speech.It indicates that education may affect the psychology of language use.In addition,it is found that the way of communication has an impact on the speaker’s verbal self-regulation.In the telephone conversation,the two sides can only hear each other’s voice,that is,they cannot see each other’s facial expressions,gestures and actions,and thus fail to catch the paralinguistic cues that is characteristic of face-to-face communication.In order to achieve their communicative purpose,the speakers tend to take more self-regulative strategies in telephone exchanges to compensate for this defect than they do in face-to-face communication.The description and analysis of the above factors enable us to see more clearly the whole picture of verbal self-monitoring.To sum up,in this paper,the concept of “self-monitoring” is introduced into the field of natural speech communication,and the external manifestations of verbal self-monitoring in different stages are presented through empirical research.We redefine the role of the disfluencies(i.e.interruptions,filled pauses,unfilled pauses,repetitions,substitutions,insertions and restarts)in verbal self-monitoring,explore the effects of relevant variables on the speaker’s verbal self-monitoring behavior,and thus reveal the properties of verbal self-monitoring and the dynamic monitoring characteristics of metacognition on verbal cognitive behavior.We hope that the above research results can provide a new perspective for further study of verbal self-monitoring mechanism,and open a new way for natural speech research in China.