In defense of lab speech

Abstract

Lab speech has often been described as unnatural, overly clear, over planned, monotonous, lacking of rich prosody, and devoid of communicative functions, interactions and emotions. Along with this view is a growing popularity for directly examining spontaneous speech for the sake of understanding spontaneous speech, especially in regard to its prosody. In this paper I argue that few of the stereotyped characteristics associated with lab speech are warranted. Instead, the quality of lab speech is a design issue rather than a matter of fundamental limitation. More importantly, because it allows systematic experimental control, lab speech is indispensable in our quest to understand the underlying mechanisms of human language. In contrast, although spontaneous speech is rich in various patterns, and so is useful for many purposes, the difficulty in recognizing and controlling the contributing factors makes it less likely than lab speech to lead to true insights about the nature of human speech.