Abstract
This paper presents a cognitive theory on the production and shaping of selfrepairs during speaking. In an extensive experimental study, a new technique is tried out: artificial elicitation of self-repairs. The data clearly indicate that two
mechanisms for computing the shape of self-repairs should be distinguished. One is based on the repair strategy called reformulation, the second one on lemma substitution. W. Levelt’s (1983, Cognition, 14, 41- 104) well-formedness rule, which connects self-repairs to coordinate structures, is shown to apply only to reformulations. In case of lemma substitution, a totally different set of rules is at work. The linguistic unit of central importance in reformulations is the major syntactic constituent; in lemma substitutions it is a prosodic unit. the phonological
phrase. A parametrization of the model yielded a very satisfactory fit between observed and reconstructed scores.
