Speechs and society

Subjects were asked to remember a short poem, and afterwards asked to record it onto tape. The tape was subsequently judged by 2 or 3 judges. This procedure was carried out at lunchtime before sleep deprivation, and at lunchtime the following day.

Judgements were made on the number of intonation, errors, pauses and mis-pronunciations. The time taken to recite the poem was also recorded.

The bar chart above shows the median pronunciation errors. The median before sleep deprivation was 0.5, and was 1.5 after sleep deprivation. Using a Wilcoxon T test, T=7 and N=13. this means the result is significant at the 0.01 level, one tailed (less than 1 in 100 chance of the result being a fluke).>

Listen to these two samples of sleep de...