An Observation on Shadowing One's Own Speech

Abstract

The process of shadowing involves a subject copying the speaker's continuous connected speech. Cherry (1953) a tele-communication engineer first noted this phenomenon. He explained phenomenon based on the feedback concepts and emphasised the importance of auditory perception in this process. Marland (1957) applied this method in treating stutterers  with the idea that auditory perception might  be  affected in  stutterers. The improvement in the fluency of the shadower was explained by  the phenomenon of 'Transfer of auditory perception'. However, the  available reports  on  this  aspect of shadowing is scanty.   Wingate (1976) reports that there has been little systematic description of subjects speech while shadowing'. Shadow speech is not a faithful copy of ordinary speech as it lacks normal prosody.  It is poorly articulated. Sergeant (1961) independently noted that in 'concurrent repetition' intelligibility scores did not improve beyond 68 per cent even with slower rate and high intensity of speech stimulus. It also happens that shadow substitutes the culture specific equivalents for slightly different words like ' air-plane ' for ' aeroplane ', he may add words of semantic equivalence.These evidences clearly contradict the idea that shadower's speech is controlled  by a transfer of his auditory perception.