Chapter 4 Monitoring and Control

Written by Stéphanie Riès
Edited by Vitória Piai for consistency and brevity

Typical healthy adult speakers are generally very good at speaking and only produce about one error every thousand words selected from 50,000 to 100,000 words in the mental lexicon (Levelt 1983). This ability to produce relatively errorless speech is thought to be enabled in part by the presence of speech monitoring mechanisms. Several theories have been proposed to explain how we monitor our speech (Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer 1999; Roelofs 2005; Nozari, Dell, and Schwartz 2011; Gauvin and Hartsuiker 2020). While these differ in how speech monitoring is implemented, all of them agree on the fact that speech can be monitored both before and after we can hear ourselves speak. Psycholinguists know that we can monitor our speech before we can hear ourselves speak because we sometimes correct our errors faster than we would if we only relied upon hearing ourselves to monitor our speech production. For example, self-corrections like “v- horizontal” where the speaker started saying “vertical” but corrected themselves after the first phoneme to say the target word “horizontal” could not have been corrected so quickly if we did not have a speech monitoring mechanism catching errors often before we even start producing them. Speech monitoring occurring before we can hear ourselves speak is referred to as inner speech monitoring and how it is implemented varies depending on the theories that have been proposed (see Figure 4.1 for a representation of the inner and outer loops of speech monitoring relative to the language production system).

Some theories propose that inner speech monitoring is supported by the language comprehension system similarly as outer speech monitoring, that is, speech monitoring occurring after we can hear ourselves speak (Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer 1999; Roelofs 2005). Other theories propose that inner speech monitoring is supported within the language production system itself and that a domain-general action monitoring system is involved too (Nozari, Dell, and Schwartz 2011; Gauvin and Hartsuiker 2020). One of the reasons some theories propose that inner speech monitoring is not supported by the language comprehension system is that people with a language disorder (see Section 5) can have speech impairments affecting their language production and their speech monitoring abilities but not their language comprehension (Nozari, Dell, and Schwartz 2011). Researchers have also found dissociations between how speakers detect errors in their own speech vs. in others’ speech (Nooteboom and Quené 2013). This also indicates that how we monitor our own speech does not entirely depend on our speech comprehension system.

Figure 4.1: Inner (yellow) and outer (orange) loops of speech monitoring. The outer loop monitors our speech as we hear ourselves speak whereas the inner loop monitors our speech before it is actually produced. Figure adapted with permission from Andrade and Ries (2022).

Take-home messages

• Healthy adults produce very few errors when speaking, thanks to speech monitoring
  
• Speech can be monitored both before and after we can hear ourselves speak, through inner and outer monitoring loops
  
• There is a debate in the literature whether inner speech monitoring is supported by the language comprehension system, as in outer speech monitoring, or within the language production system itself
  

Suggestions for further reading
The interested reader is referred to additional literature on monitoring and self repairs (Nooteboom and Quené 2017; Boland et al. 2005), and additional theoretical work (Hartsuiker and Kolk 2001)

Exercise 4.1 Think about the errors you collected in section 1. Is there evidence in those errors that people were monitoring their speech?

References

Andrade, K. D., and S. K. Riès. 2022. “How Do We Catch Our Tongue from Slipping?” Frontiers for Young Minds.

Boland, Heleen T., Robert J. Hartsuiker, Martin J. Pickering, and Albert Postma. 2005. “Repairing Inappropriately Specified Utterances: Revision or Restart?” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 12 (3): 472–77. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03193790.

Gauvin, Hanna S., and Robert J. Hartsuiker. 2020. “Towards a New Model of Verbal Monitoring.” Journal of Cognition 3 (1). https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.81.

Hartsuiker, Robert J., and Herman H. J. Kolk. 2001. “Error Monitoring in Speech Production: A Computational Test of the Perceptual Loop Theory.” Cognitive Psychology 42 (2): 113–57. https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.2000.0744.

Levelt, W. J. M. 1983. “Monitoring and Self-Repair in Speech.” Cognition 14 (1): 41–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(83)90026-4.

Levelt, W. J. M., Ardi Roelofs, and Antje S. Meyer. 1999. “A Theory of Lexical Access in Speech Production.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (1): 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X99001776.

Nooteboom, Sieb G., and Hugo Quené. 2013. “Parallels Between Self-Monitoring for Speech Errors and Identification of the Misspoken Segments.” Journal of Memory and Language 69 (3): 417–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2013.04.006.

———. 2017. “Self-Monitoring for Speech Errors: Two-Stage Detection and Repair with and Without Auditory Feedback.” Journal of Memory and Language 95 (August): 19–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2017.01.007.

Nozari, Nazbanou, Gary S. Dell, and Myrna F. Schwartz. 2011. “Is Comprehension Necessary for Error Detection? A Conflict-Based Account of Monitoring in Speech Production.” Cognitive Psychology 63 (1): 1–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2011.05.001.

Roelofs, Ardi. 2005. “Spoken Word Planning, Comprehending, and Self-Monitoring: Evaluation of WEAVER++.” In Phonological Encoding and Monitoring in Normal and Pathological Speech, edited by A. Postma R. J. Hartsuiker R. Bastiaanse and F. Wijnen, 42–63. Psychology Press.