A Psycholinguistic Approach To The Self-repair In Mandarin Speech Production

The on line nature of human spontaneous speech gives rise to speech errors anddisfluencies typical of hesitation, pause, silence, repetition, repair, etc. It has invitedthe attention of psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, computational linguistics,neurolinguistics and etc. which have, since the last century, exerted enormous effortsin the research on the speech by dint of speech errors and corpora, endeavoring tounveil the nature of human speech production and comprehension. With assiduousefforts, researchers have established many models of speech production and theoriesas well and laid bare many a rule concerning the speech, linguistically,psychologically and cognitively. The research has also boosted the study of speechrepair. As known, researchers have made a wide scope of study concerning the repairfrom the perspective of linguistics, sociolinguistics, empirical experiments andcomputational statistics, yet the psycholinguistic approach is still barren as indicatedin the definition of the repair. Therefore, the present paper, starting with the discussionof repair internal structure, intends to make a tentative study on the repair, this timeself-repair, from the psycholinguistic perspective in the light of levelt's theories onself-monitoring and self-repairs, endeavoring to reveal the mental informationprocessing features in the stages of self-monitoring, repair planning and the self repairand correct the definition. The paper concludes that speech repair is in itself acomplex psychological and cognitive process. Besides, the paper points out that therepair is rule-governed and merits due attention. Then basing on data from Mandarinproduction on first hand, the author classifies self-repairs by the reason to repairduring Mandarin production process; revises the structure of the self-repair duringspeech production; supplements new types of self-repairs; describes the distribution ofself-repairs in the experiment, all of which bring about fulfillment of the tentativestudy on exploring self-repair particularity in Mandarin production and stimulatingresearches on self-repair commmonality.