The Phonetics of Lexical Self-Repair in Colombian Spanish Unscripted Speech

This thesis investigates temporal organization and prosodic marking in unscripted lexical self-repair. It focuses on repair in Colombian Spanish, aiming to assess the extent to which the findings on the phonetics of lexical self-repair in other languages generalize to Spanish. Specifically, it aims to determine whether the distinction between trouble sources detected early in speech, in contrast to those identified late, is phonetically reflected in the studied subset of repairs; to explore the extent to which linguistic and factual errors, as opposed to appropriateness infelicities, result in phonetically distinct repairs; and to describe how sequences with and without editing terms influence repair strategies.

The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part describes the design and collection of the Unscripted Colombian Spanish Interaction (UCSI) Corpus, which comprises high-quality spontaneous speech recordings. The second part quantitatively examines the temporal organization of repair focusing on the time it takes to interrupt speech once a trouble source is identified (i.e., Target-to-cut-off); and the time it takes to repair once the flow of speech has bee586n interrupted (i.e., Cut-off-to-repair). Results showed that clustering the timing intervals into ‘early’ and ‘late’ ranges is informative, with linguistic and factual errors differing from appropriateness infelicities in the Target-to-cut-off, particularly when editing terms are present. The third part investigates prosodic marking by quantifying three acoustic parameters associated with prominence: Periodic Energy, Pitch and Speech Rate. Findings showed that while there is a preference for marking repairs in Colombian Spanish, only Periodic Energy distinguishes errors from infelicities with early interruptions unexpectedly found unmarked.

The thesis contributes to our knowledge of cross-linguistic patterns in self-repair by providing insights into the phonetic and prosodic variability within repair strategies in Colombian Spanish. The thesis also highlights the relevance of observing repair in spontaneous speech, as it uncovers further details on the interaction between language structure and real-time communication.