Davy & MacWhinney - Spanish Sentence Production

Spanish Sentence Production

Abstract

The goal of this study is to determine whether and how oral repetition can improve the fluent production of Spanish sentences of various lengths and constructions. We do this by presenting students with spoken Spanish sentences and letting them practice repeating them back. In the pilot study, students heard each sentence three times and immediately repeated it back. We measured the length of the repetition (how long it took them to repeat it back) and recorded the number and types of errors they made. We found that the practice helped students fluently repeat the sentences they heard, in terms of number of errors made and in the time needed to repeat the sentence.

Current studies train students to practice speaking sentences by describing series of pictures. During training, students see pictures and hear the sentence described by those pictures and are asked to repeat the sentence back. After the initial training phase, students should be able to respond to the pictures without hearing the spoken sentence. Future work will also look at different factors that may make a difference in training, including whether it is better to train on full sentences or on individual phrases.

Research Questions

1. During an oral repetition task, do students increase fluency in terms of the time it takes them to repeat back the sentence?

2. Does this task help students increase fluency in terms of the amount of errors they make?

3. Are students aware of their own speech, to the extent that they can accurately rate their own performance?

4. Will students be able to transfer their increased fluency to novel sentences?

Study One

Study one tested whether or not a repetition task could increase fluent production of the sentences.

Hypothesis

We hypothesized that, to answer research question 1, the amount of time the student took to repeat the sentence would decrease. As to question 2, we predicted that students would produce fewer errors. We also predicted that students would be able to significantly rate their accuracy. Study 1 does not address research question 4, since it doesn't involve repeating novel sentences.

Independent Variables

The study was a within-subjects design, with the repetition number as the independent variable. So, we tracked fluency across the four repetitions of each sentence. We also varied the length of the sentences the students heard. The sentences were between four and 19 words, with an average of 8.42 words, and between 9 and 31 syllables, with an average of 15.84 words.

Dependent Variables

In this study, we use three measurements of fluency: pre-speech pause (the amount of time before the student starts speaking), articulation time (the amount of time it takes the student to say the sentence from start to finish) and the number and type of errors and corrections the students make.

Results

First, we discovered that across attempts, the time it took participants to repeat the sentence lessened. We measured this by looking both at the time between when they started speaking to when they completed the repetition, and in the initial pause, the time between when the audio stimulus ended and they started speaking. There were significant decreases in both of these times. We also discovered that across attempts, the number of correctly repeated sentences increased, and the number of incomplete sentences (ones they could not successfully repeat) decreased significantly. We also found that across attempts participants had significantly fewer missing words and different wordings (where the repetition kept the same meaning as the original but with different wording). Doing a trends analysis, we also found significant linear relationships for the number of repetitions/corrections and wrong article usages. However, contrary to what we expected, we found that in both of these cases the number of repetitions/corrections and wrong articles actually increased across attempts.

We also wanted to determine the extent to which students are aware of their own speech and whether they are able to accurately rate their own performance. To determine this, we looked at whether the time taken to repeat the sentence and a number of different errors correlated with their rating of their own speech. First we looked at the duration of the utterance, and found a significant correlation, with a rating of 3 having the longest mean duration of utterance and 7 having the lowest. Ratings of 1 and 2 had shorter durations, because ratings of 1 and 2 generally indicated that they were unable to repeat the sentence, leading to shorter, incomplete sentences. Second, we looked at whether students who rated their proficiency as being higher made fewer errors in their speech. We found that a) students who failed to complete the sentence could reliably rate their performance as a 1 or 2, and b) students with fewer errors rated their performance as higher than those who made more errors. This finding held true for all types of errors except grammatical gender errors. Students did not seem sensitive to grammatical gender errors, and were not more likely to rate their performance as lower.