Is Distant Recall Speech more difficult than Immediate Recall Speech? If so, why?

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of Working Memory on two different types of running speech tasks. Previous work regarding speech research has shown that there are a number of factors that causes disfluency in typical speakers, however, the results established between these groups are inconsistent. Student researchers Don (2015) and Olulode (2016) conducted a similar study investigating the effects of Working Memory and how it impacts running speech. The results established in both studies contradicted each other, where Don (2015) found a significant negative correlation between Working Memory capacity and frequency of disfluencies made in speech, whilst Olulode found no significant correlations at all. It is noteworthy that both researchers used different types of speaking task to obtain the speech samples used for disfluency analysis. This study aimed to replicate these two studies to further understand the difference between these two speaking tasks and investigate the variation in the disfluencies observed in both by comparing them to each other and examining how they correlate with working memory. The results were examined and analysed using SPSS to identify any statistical significance to the data. The results from this study did not agree with the findings of Don (2015), but reaffirms to the findings of Olulode (2016), where no significant correlations were found between working memory capacity and disfluencies in speech. A significant difference was found between the number of disfluencies participants made in immediate recall and distant recall, highlighting that different speaking tasks would access the speaking production model in varying ways and that there are varying levels of difficulty in speaking tasks, dependant on the situation and content of their speech.