Speech Errors Produced by EFL Learners of Islamic Boarding School in Telling English Story

The students of Islamic Boarding School Nurul Islam are used to learn spoken English, but they still make some errors when they are speaking. They often produce some speech errors when they are making an English conversation or when they are getting turn to speak in front of the class. This study aims to investigate the existence and the frequency of speech errors especially Silent Pause and Filled Pause produced by the students of Islamic Boarding School Nurul Islam in telling English Story. This research is a descriptive-qualitative with data presented in statistical forms. The object of this research is Speech Errors produced by students in telling English Story. And the respondents are 30 students from the 8th grade of English Tutorial Program in Islamic Boarding School Nurul Islam in the academic year of 2016/2017. This research was conducted by observation. It was to investigate the existence of Silent Pause and Filled Pause produced by the students in telling English story and to investigate the percentages of each speech errors. The findings of the observation in this research show 603 (100%) speech errors produced by students. Silent pause is 524 (87%) and Filled Pause is 79 (13%). 

Discourse markers activate their, <i>like</i>, cohort competitors

Speech in everyday conversations is riddled with discourse markers (DMs), such as well, you know, and like. However, in many lab-based studies of speech comprehension, such DMs are typically absent from the carefully articulated and highly controlled speech stimuli. As such, little is known about how these DMs influence online word recognition. The present study specifically investigated the online processing of DM like and how it influences the activation of words in the mental lexicon. We specifically targeted the cohort competitor (CC) effect in the Visual World Paradigm: Upon hearing spoken instructions to “pick up the beaker,” human listeners also typically fixate—next to the target object—referents that overlap phonologically with the target word (cohort competitors such as beetle; CCs). However, several studies have argued that CC effects are constrained by syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse constraints. Therefore, the present study investigated whether DM like influences online word recognition by activating its cohort competitors (e.g., lightbulb). In an eye-tracking experiment using the Visual World Paradigm, we demonstrate that when participants heard spoken instructions such as “Now press the button for the, like … unicycle,” they showed anticipatory looks to the CC referent (lightbulb)well before hearing the target. This CC effect was sustained for a relatively long period of time, even despite hearing disambiguating information (i.e., the /k/ in like). Analysis of the reaction times also showed that participants were significantly faster to select CC targets (lightbulb) when preceded by DM like. These findings suggest that seemingly trivial DMs, such as like, activate their CCs, impacting online word recognition. Thus, we advocate a more holistic perspective on spoken language comprehension in naturalistic communication, including the processing of DMs

The Effect of Filled Pauses and Speaking Rate on Speech Comprehension in Natural, Vocoded and Synthetic Speech

It has been shown that in natural speech filled pauses can be beneficial to a listener. In this paper, we attempt to discover whether listeners react in a similar way to filled pauses in syn-thetic and vocoded speech compared to natural speech. We present two experiments focusing on reaction time to a target word. In the first, we replicate earlier work in natural speech, namely that listeners respond faster to a target word following a filled pause than following a silent pause. This is replicated in vocoded but not in synthetic speech. Our second experiment investigates the effect of speaking rate on reaction times as this was potentially a confounding factor in the first experiment. Ev-idence suggests that slower speech rates lead to slower reaction times in synthetic and in natural speech. Moreover, in synthetic speech the response to a target word after a filled pause is slower than after a silent pause. This finding, combined with an overall slower reaction time, demonstrates a shortfall in current synthe-sis techniques. Remedying this could help make synthesis less demanding and more pleasant for the listener, and reaction time experiments could thus provide a measure of improvement in synthesis techniques. Index Terms: HMM-synthesis, speech synthesis, reaction time, filled pause, disfluency, speaking rate, speech perceptio