Thornbury Chapter 1: What speakers do
What are the characteristics of speech production?
- it's a linear process - usually produced utterance-by-utterance (=each utterance is dependent on a preceding one) - planning time is limited
What production strategies do speakers use?
- pause fillers (uhm , er, erm) - vagueness expressions (I mean, sort of, ...) - repeats (repetition of a single word at a point where formulation has been temporarily paused)
What is fluency?
- pausing - appropriate placement of pauses - length of a run (number of syllables between pauses) - speed Pauses may be long, but not frequent! The are usually filled and occur at meaningful transition points.
How can automaticity be achieved?
- use of pre-fabricated chunks - familiarity of story to the speaker - the more you practise, the better you will get at forming small chunks into larger units
What two parts does an utterance consist of?
1 Topic (what you are talking about) 2 Comment (what we want to say about the topic)
How are sounds produced?
A stream of air (produced in the lungs) is driven through the vocal cords. Then it is shaped by the position of the tongue, teeth and lips. Vowel sounds: mainly produced by action of tongue/lips Consonant sounds: determined by the point at which the air stream is obstructed
How are interactional moves signalled in business meetings and in casual talk between friends?
Business meetings/classrooms: - interactional moves are formally signed (raising hand) Casual talk: - discourse markers are used to signal a speaker's conversational intention (that reminds me, by the way, well anyway)
How are words "glued" together?
By the insertion of grammatical markers: - articles - auxiliary verbs - word endings
What is an add-on strategy?
Chaining together of short phrases and clause-like chunks, which accumulate to form an extended turn. (These are not complete sentences and are used to compensate for limited planning time.)
What rules and skills of turn-taking are there?
Rules: - speakers should take turns holding the floor - speakers should avoid long silences - speakers should listen to what their conversation partners are saying Skills: - people should recognise the right moment to get a turn - people should recognise when another speaker wants to take a turn - people should signalise when they want to speak - people should signalise that they are listening - people should hold the floor when speaking - people should yield the turn
What are phonemes?
Sounds that determine the meaning of words. They are the smallest unit of language. (Could be the change of i to u in sing-sung)
What is a turn?
The duration of speaker A until he/she gets interrupted by speaker B or passes on the turn.
What are production strategies?
Tricks to give at least the illusion of fluency and to compensate for the attentional demands.
