Abstract
Four undergraduate volunteers, two women and two men, transcribed an audiotaped interview of former United States President Ronald Reagan by Dan Rather. Their first transcript was made from a single complete playing, with only pausing, but no repetition or replay allowed. Thereafter, two of the transcribers made corrections by an “on-line” method—complete playings as often as they wished. The two others were allowed an “off-line” method—unlimited playback of any portions. None produced a verbatim transcription, but all preserved semantic content quite well. Still, deletions were numerous, particularly of discourse markers and hesitation phenomena, both of which characterize spoken, not written discourse. Significantly more deletions in the on-line than in the off-line condition indicated the difficulty of audiotape processing without off-line replay. These results are discussed in light of recent theories of speech processing.
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The authors wish to acknowledge gratefully the help of the four students who served as volunteer transcribers: Arthur Anger, Rhonda McKitten, Alison Miller, and William Walsh. The second author wishes to acknowledge with gratitude a Study Visit grant to Germany from the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst for the summer of 1993, which partially supported this project.
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Lindsay, J., O'Connell, D.C. How do transcribers deal with audio recordings of spoken discourse?. J Psycholinguist Res 24, 101–115 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02143958
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02143958