Respeaking crisis points. An exploratory study into critical moments in the respeaking process

In this paper we introduce respeaking crisis points (RCPs), understood as potentially problematic moments in the respeaking process, resulting from the difficulty of the source material and/or cognitive overload on the part of the respeakers. We present results of the respeaking study on Polish participants who respoke four videos intralingually (Polish to Polish) and one interlingually (from English to Polish). We measured the participants’ cognitive load with EEG (Emotiv) using two measures: concentration and frustration. By analysing peaks in both EEG measures, we show where respeaking crisis points occurred. Features that triggered RCPs include very slow and very fast speech rate, visual complexity of the material, overlapping speech, numbers and proper names, speaker changes, word play, syntactic complexity, and implied meaning. The results of this study are directly applicable to respeaker training and provide valuable insights into the respeaking process from the cognitive perspective.