Self-Monitoring in Speaking

Abstract

Typically, speakers produce their spoken utterances correctly, as intended, in a fluent manner. Sometimes, however, a mishap occurs during the process of speech production, which may lead to an error or disfluency in the resulting speech. This article focuses on the feedback system that enables speakers to detect and repair such mishaps and errors themselves. Studying speakers’ self-monitoring in speaking offers essential and valuable insights in the cognitive, linguistic, mental, neural, and articulatory processes involved in speech production. The article discusses important properties of speakers’ self-monitoring behavior, among which the observation that some errors are repaired late after the error, others early or even immediately after the error, while many errors remain unrepaired. Three families of theoretical models that explain speakers’ self-monitoring behavior are discussed. Neurolinguistic evidence suggests that the anterior cingulate cortex is involved in self- monitoring, with other brain areas and structures also being involved. A separate section of this article is devoted to self-monitoring in first versus second language. The research discussed here suggests that a speaker’s fluency and self-monitoring behavior may be regarded as an individual trait of that speaker, across languages. The article presents three open questions for further research into self-monitoring: How does self-monitoring work in languages different from the few studied so far? How do children acquire self-monitoring in tandem with their first language? And finally, what are the relevant factors driving the processes and mechanisms of self-monitoring? The article ends with suggestions for further reading.