ADEQUACY IN A STRATEGIC PLANNING STUDY

SCRUTINIZING THE USE OF AN ADDITIONAL SPEECH DIMENSION

Résumé

This article presents the results of a study that aimed at scrutinizing adequacy adopted  as a speech dimension and measure in Specht and D’Ely (2020)’s study. Adequacy is a dimension and a measure little explored in studies that analyze speech performance from a cognitive perspective. In the case of Specht and D’Ely, they decided to include it to tackle more discourse-oriented features of speech performance. The composition of the measure was the sum of raters’ scores to five criteria: structure, appeal, clarity, lexical choice and fluency. However, it was not analyzed whether all criteria had an impact on participants’ speech performances individually. For that, statistical analyses were run (a) to examine whether adequacy may be considered a separate speech dimension different from other speech dimensions used in the study, complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) and (b) to understand whether all criteria had an active role in the measure and if not which one(s) did. The results have shown that adequacy may be considered a specific speech dimension, and that every criteria, except for fluency, had an active role in the measure, being textual organization (structure) a more salient criterion.