Processing of self-repairs in stuttered and non-stuttered speech

ABSTRACT

Previous research suggests that listeners can use the presence of speech disfluencies to predict upcoming linguistic input. But how is the processing of typical disfluencies affected when the speaker also produces atypical disfluencies, as in the case of stuttering? We addressed this question in a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which participants heard self-repair disfluencies while viewing displays that contained a predictable target entity. Half the participants heard the sentences spoken by a speaker who stuttered, and half heard the sentences spoken by the same speaker who produced the sentences without stuttering. Results replicated previous work in demonstrating that listeners engage in robust predictive processing when hearing self-repair disfluencies. Crucially, the magnitude of the prediction effect was reduced when the speaker stuttered compared to when the speaker did not stutter. Overall, the results suggest that listeners’ ability to model the production system of a speaker is disrupted when the speaker stutters.

KEYWORDS:

• Disfluencies
• repairs
• stuttering
• prediction
• eye movements

Acknowledgements

We thank Alissa Belmont for assistance in preparing the stimuli and John Lim for assistance in conducting the experiment. We also thank the speaker for volunteering his time to record the utterances.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data and analysis scripts that support the findings of this study are openly available via Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/3xfpv/.

Notes

1 We also conducted a supplementary analysis using proportion of fixations per participant per trial as our dependent measure. The results were identical to those presented here. Most notably, there was a significant Sentence-by-Speaker interaction, p < .005, reflecting the smaller prediction effect in the Stutter condition compared to the No-Stutter condition.

2 When the analysis was conducted using proportion of fixations per participant per trial as the dependent measure, the Sentence-by-Experiment interaction was fully significant, p < .01.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by grants from NICHD [grant number F32 HD084100]) awarded to M.W.L. and NIDCD [grant number R56 DC013545] awarded to N.D.M. and F.F.