Effect of Speaker’s Fatigue on Features of Spoken Discourse

In clinical linguistics, spoken discourse analysis is a crucial part of diagnostics as well as fundamental research of speech produced by people with various language impairments. The most common features for assessment are speech fluency, speech failures, errors, and syntactic complexity measures. However, several studies have shown that some of these parameters can be affected by fatigue or physical stress. Our study on narrative and procedural spoken discourse by healthy speakers with different levels of fatigue has shown a significant effect of fatigue level on speech tempo, and the elicitation task significantly affected multiple characteristics of spoken discourse