Agencies
... Read More
By clicking “Accept All Cookies”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. Cookie Policy.
Written By: Agencies | Updated : May 3, 2014 9:21 PM IST
You may find the question a bit awkward and even inconsequential if you have assumed all along that you knew what you said before you actually said it. But research suggests that you rely a lot on what you hear to know what you said. Auditory feedback plays an important role in helping us determine what we are saying as we speak, research reveals.
'Our results indicate that speakers listen to their own voices to help specify the meaning of what they are saying,' said researcher Andreas Lind of Lund University in Sweden. Theories about how we produce speech often assume that we start with a clear, preverbal idea of what to say that goes through different levels of encoding to finally become an utterance.
But the findings support an alternative model in which speech is more than just a dutiful translation of this preverbal message. For the study, researchers asked the participants to complete a classic Stroop test, which provided a controlled linguistic setting. During the test, participants were presented with various colour words (like 'red' or 'green') one at a time on a screen and were tasked with naming the colour of the font that each word was printed in, rather than the colour that the word itself signified. (Read: Hearing loss or deafness: 7 facts you ought to know)
The participants wore headphones that provided real-time auditory feedback as they took the test. But the researchers had rigged the feedback using a voice-triggered playback system without the knowledge of the participants. They found that in many cases, when asked to report what they had said, participants reported the word they had heard through feedback, rather than the word they had actually said. (Read: Could you be going deaf due to these causes?)
'These findings suggest that the meaning of an utterance is not entirely internal to the speaker, but that it is also determined by the feedback we receive from our utterances, and from the inferences we draw from the wider conversational context,' Lind explained. The effect may be even more pronounced in everyday conversation, which is less constrained and more ambiguous than the context offered by the Stroop test. (Read: Revealed how the noise around you is making you deaf!)
The study appeared in the journal Psychological Science.
Source: IANS
For more articles on diseases & conditions , visit our diseases & conditions section. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for all the latest updates! For daily free health tips, sign up for our newsletter. And to join discussions on health topics of your choice, visit our forum.
