Relationship of disturbances and hesitations in spontaneous speech to anxiety.

Past work has indicated that or confused speech can be classed into several distinct speech disturbance categories. Such disturbances, occurring frequently in everyday conversation, have no conventional semantic function. In the present study, 25 experimental and 20 control male Ss were used. Anxiety was manipulated in an interview setting. Under anxiety, the frequency of all speech disturbances, except the familiar ah, showed a sizable increase. The frequency of ah's increased strikingly in a change from normal to a telephonelike conversation. Such change did not affect the other disturbances. Measurement of palmar sweat revealed modest positive association with the speech disturbances. Exploration of the relationship of the Taylor Manifest Anxiety scale to the disturbances suggested that the ah is functionally distinct from the other speech disturbances. This paper is concerned with an investigation of the relationship between experimentally induced anxiety and certain kinds of speech disruptions. In approaching the problem of psychological analysis of human speech and its content, one can take, roughly, two general directions. The first one stresses the manifest content of the message and relies more or less on its face validity. Moreover, when it becomes quantitative, it seems to assume an isomorphic relation between a particular behavioral state (e.g., the intensity of fear) and the quantitative aspects of the content (e.g., the frequency of statements about fear). The direction of the second approach leads one to emphasize the instrumental function of language and speech, which may frequently lie in the seemingly irrelevant, nonlexical aspects of the message. Thus language may have signal properties which lie beyond its symbolic nature. The intent of the experiment described below was to demonstrate the usefulness of the latter approach without arguing, except perhaps indirectly, the weaknesses of the former. Language is seen as an expressive behavior system with instrumental and reactive properties; the speech disturbances, the flustered speech, are taken to be a nonlexical attribute that is relatively free from both linguistic and general social control. That is, these aspects of speech are assumed to be linguistically irrelevant. SPEECH DISTURBANCES AND PREVIOUS WORK WITH THEM High-fidelity tape recordings of psychotherapy interviews have revealed that instances of confused or flustered speech can be analyzed into a variety of separate, identifi