{"id":848,"date":"2008-11-20T11:48:51","date_gmt":"2008-11-20T15:48:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=848"},"modified":"2008-11-20T12:22:16","modified_gmt":"2008-11-20T16:22:16","slug":"speaking-incoherently","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=848","title":{"rendered":"Speaking (in)coherently"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, LizardBreath<\/a> at Unfogged made an excellent point in response to my recent post<\/a> about Sarah Palin's (in)coherence (\"I Think There's A Problem With the Methodology Here<\/a>\", 11\/19\/2008):<\/p>\n

If even the clearest speakers' speech often looks incoherent when transcribed, then this argument establishes that no one can ever be validly criticized as an unusually incoherent speaker. And that can't possibly be right — some people do sound clear and logical when they talk, and other people sound error-ridden and confused. <\/span><\/p>\n

I agree with her. It would be nice to be able to tag speakers with some sort of Standard Coherence Index — and I'm sure we'd find that there are large individual differences. But we need a better methodology than relying on journalists or bloggers to pick illustrative examples in a polemical context, especially if the examples are quoted from transcripts.<\/p>\n

Among the reasons:<\/p>\n

1) Speakers are variable. Each of us is sometimes clearer and more logical, and sometimes more error-ridden and confused. Anyone can be made to look better or worse, depending on what examples are chosen.<\/p>\n

2) Writing is not speech. Many sorts of disfluencies (false starts, self-corrections, filled or unfilled pauses) can be spoken in ways that make them nearly transparent to the listener. They can even be an aid to understanding in some cases — but they can also be very disruptive. The same is true for parenthetical asides and other meaningful interpolations. We don't even have good ways to quantify the amount of disfluency and complexity, much less the quality of its performance and its impact on listeners.<\/p>\n

3) Transcripts are unreliable. They're often created or edited in ways that make them easier to read, but they can also be produced in ways that make them harder. And some of the rhetorical techniques that are effective in speaking are hard or impossible to render effectively in a transcript, where we're missing the effects of pitch contour, speaking rate, voice quality, and so on.<\/p>\n

4) Listeners are also variable and unreliable. The same passage may strike one person as entirely lucid and another as so incoherent as to be hardly human. This effect is especially strong for people, groups, ideas, or ways of talking that elicit strong negative emotions: a hated celebrity, pronunciations or usages associated with a despised group, conceptual pet peeves, and so on. We've discussed many examples over the years, but perhaps none has been clearer than the Plain English Campaign's 2003 Foot in Mouth award to Donald Rumsfeld for his \"unknown unknowns\" remark<\/a>.<\/p>\n

5) Coherence is complicated. Whether in speech or in writing, there are lots of levels on which a passage can cohere or fall apart. Does the underlying argument make sense? Are its parts and their relationship phrased clearly? Are there too many qualifications and explanatory interpolations, or not enough? Is the performance fluent? Do listeners find the disfluencies helpful or harmful or neutral?<\/p>\n

Independent of any political application, it would be nice to have an intersubjectively valid way of evaluating the coherence of spoken discourse in terms or dimensions like these, or (more plausibly) in terms of useful proxies for them. Meanwhile, it seems to me to be entirely reasonable to try to analyze someone's speaking style in a more informal mode, as ShadowFox does in this comment<\/a>. I'm not sure whether that analysis is correct, but it seems sensible and to some extent testable.<\/p>\n

LizardBreath again:<\/p>\n

Doesn't it seem more persuasive to assume that there is a difference between competent, coherent speech and stumbly, confused speech, but that looking at transcripts, rather than listening to the speech as produced, is a poor way of distinguishing the two?<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes.\u00a0 But this is only part of it. Our reaction to\" the speech as produced\" may be part of a cycle of confirmation bias, where we decide that person X is characteristically Y, and so we notice when X is Y, but not when X isn't Y, or when others are or aren't Y. And journalists or bloggers may be guiding us into this cycle, by converging on the \"X is Y\" narrative, and plying us with example after example to illustrate it.<\/p>\n

LizardBreath's conclusion:<\/p>\n

Now, this doesn't mean that any particular criticism of a politician as a bad speaker is justified. But you can't point to a bad-looking transcript from a good speaker and use it to prove that there's no such thing as a poor speaker.<\/span><\/p>\n

Agreed. My point was only that a single passage from a (mispunctuated) transcript is not good evidence that someone is a characteristically incoherent speaker, and we should be especially wary of accepting it as reliable confirmation of a widely-held belief to that effect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, LizardBreath at Unfogged made an excellent point in response to my recent post about Sarah Palin's (in)coherence (\"I Think There's A Problem With the Methodology Here\", 11\/19\/2008): If even the clearest speakers' speech often looks incoherent when transcribed, then this argument establishes that no one can ever be validly criticized as an unusually incoherent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}