Abstract
Samples of spontaneous speech were analyzed according to their distributions of phonations and silences. Some of these exhibited cyclic, or “rhythmic,” patterns, in the sense defined by Goldman-Eisler. Transcripts of three such samples were subjected to a segmentation procedure carried out by independent judges utilizing a common semantic intuition. Points in the transcripts where agreement was high among the judges were found to correspond with the beginnings of temporal cycles, and agreed semantic segments coincided with sentence or clause boundaries and usually consisted of several clauses and more than one sentence. It is argued that a theory of speech generation must contain provision for semantic integration at the suprasentential level.
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A shorter version of this paper was given at the British Psychological Society London Conference, December, 1972.
The experiments reported here were carried out while the author was at the Psycholinguistics Research Unit, University College, London.
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Butterworth, B. Hesitation and semantic planning in speech. J Psycholinguist Res 4, 75–87 (1975). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01066991
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01066991