REPAIRS, HEDGING AND THE INTERCONNECTED BRAIN FUNCTIONS IN SPONTANOUS SPEECH ERROR CORRECTIONS OF INTERLOCUTOR’S SPEECH EVENTS
The brain is said to be responsible for nearly all the functions of the body and this include hedging, repairs and the appropriate retrieval of mental signals expressed as words. Hedging and speech error repairs as well as the interpretation of such are premised on previous knowledge and experiences hence, the understanding of the correlation and complexities of human brain and their cognitive abilities and functions in speech event of interlocutors has become a great concern to linguists and thus have spurned a society-based finding. The study adopted Hymes (1970) communicative competence as theoretical model and using a content analysis under the qualitative analytical method and descriptive analysis under the quantitative analytical method, the paper investigated the various brain functions in the use of hedges and the speech repairs of 120 interlocutors selected through systematic sampling technique. Findings showed that speech repairs occurred when a speaker employs mechanisms initiated by the brain in order to correct a detected error which was corrected by the speaker or the listener. The correction was achieved by the use of hedges of different sots- as; arm, um, uh, err, ah, like, right and you know. In some cases, speakers repeated, added, replaced, or even abandoned their constructions. The paper concluded that repair processes are largely controlled by the brain as one spontaneously self-repaired and self-initiated corrections of one’s own speech through hedging within the same speech process and recommends that the human brain should be dully enlisted as a major organ of speech as the brain plays a key role in both hedging and speech repairs.
Repairs, Hedging, Language, Speech, Brain, Interlocutors