An investigation into the effect personality has on the amount a person, uh, hesitates.

Abstract

Within the current area of speech production, there has been some investigation into how speech can become disfluent and what factors have an effect on a speaker's ability to produce fluent speech: for example, gender, role of speaker and cognitive load of the utterance. However, little research has been conducted into the effect that personality has on fluency. Participants completed the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire in order to generate a score for Interpersonal personality aspects. They also undertook two running speech tasks in order to see the effect that personality, specifically aspects of Interpersonal personality, have on the frequency of hesitations produced by the speakers. It was found that there is no significant correlation between an individual's Interpersonal score and the frequency with which they hesitate during running speech. The experiment did however find that there is a difference in the amount of hesitations produced between the two running speech tasks: participants produced a higher frequency of hesitations during the recall running speech task than during the commentary running speech task. This study highlights that there is no correlation between an individual's Interpersonal score and the frequency with which they hesitate during running speech although there is a difference in the production of hesitations between the two running speech tasks: higher frequency of hesitation produced during the recall running speech task.