Temporal organisation in lexical self-repair in Colombian Spanish unscripted speech

We report on an investigation of the temporal organization of lexical self-repair, focusing on the timing of the speech cut-off and repair onset. [1] showed that speech error repairs in which speech is interrupted early are completed quickly, while later repairs are generally slower. This supports the idea that early repairs are initiated through inner speech monitoring, and late repairs through overt speech monitoring. Research on lexical repair [2] suggested that different subtypes of repair are subject to different temporal constraints. Moreover, [3] proposed that speakers may strategically delay repair onset. This study investigates error-to-cut-off and cutoff-to-repair interval durations in lexical repairs sampled from a corpus of Colombian Spanish conversation. It assesses the correlation between interval durations and the predictive power of semantic variables. The results provide support for the findings of [1] but not entirely for [2]; also, they support the notion that speakers may delay interruption and repair.