Julie M. Liss
Dept. of Commun. Disord., Minneapolis, MN 55455
Speakers use certain cues to let listeners know when they are revising a speech production error. This marking of revisions---often prosodic or semantic in form---is related to the amount of contrast between error and repair, and may be driven by the speaker's perception of how the error has affected the integrity of the intended message [W. J. M. Levelt and A. Cutler, J. Semantics 2, 205--217 (1983)]. The present study examined error revisions in the spontaneous speech of four men with apraxia of speech (AOS). Successive approximations of words, in which speakers eventually produced the intended target, were evaluated. Acoustic and perceptual analysis revealed that, as for normal speakers, these subjects often marked repair attempts through modifications of duration, intensity and fundamental frequency. However, interpretation of error revision in AOS is complicated by the observations that, (1) speakers did not always revise, even when words were severely distorted, and (2) the final ``accepted'' productions (i.e., those following successive approximations) were often distorted. Results will be discussed relative to theories of speech production and perception, and with regard to self-monitoring among disordered speakers.