Shadowing task (source code)

= Shadowing task

A <shadowing task> asks a participant to repeat incoming speech aloud while continuing to listen. The delay and accuracy of repetition provide behavioural measures of processing an unfolding speech stream. The task differs from repeating a whole sentence only after the speaker has finished.

<William D. Marslen-Wilson> and <Alan Welsh> used shadowing with altered pronunciations in continuous speech. Whether listeners repeated a changed form or fluently restored the expected word depended on aspects of the input and context. Comparison with a <mispronunciation detection task> helped show that task instructions change which influences appear in the measured response.<Processing interactions and lexical access during word recognition in continuous speech by William D. Marslen-Wilson and Alan Welsh>[Abstract; fluent restorations, syllable position and contextual constraints]{ref}

A restoration is an observation about the spoken response. It does not alone establish that a listener consciously heard the original sound correctly, nor that every intervening processing stage had the same representation. This makes shadowing useful for testing the time course of <spoken word recognition> while keeping response production part of the explanation.