If you say thee uh you are describing something hard: the on-line attribution of disfluency during reference comprehension.

Eye-tracking and gating experiments examined reference comprehension with fluent (Click on the red. . .) and disfluent (Click on [pause] thee uh red . . .) instructions while listeners viewed displays with 2 familiar (e.g., ice cream cones) and 2 unfamiliar objects (e.g., squiggly shapes). Disfluent instructions made unfamiliar objects more expected, which influenced listeners' on-line hypotheses from the onset of the color word. The unfamiliarity bias was sharply reduced by instructions that the speaker had object agnosia, and thus difficulty naming familiar objects (Experiment 2), but was not affected by intermittent sources of speaker distraction (beeps and construction noises; Experiments 3). The authors conclude that listeners can make situation-specific inferences about likely sources of disfluency, but there are some limitations to these attributions.

[1]  F. Goldman-Eisler Psycholinguistics: Experiments in spontaneous speech , 1968 .

[2]  WILLIAM MARSLEN-WILSON,et al.  Linguistic Structure and Speech Shadowing at Very Short Latencies , 1973, Nature.

[3]  Roger M. Cooper,et al.  The control of eye fixation by the meaning of spoken language: A new methodology for the real-time investigation of speech perception, memory, and language processing. , 1974 .

[4]  W D Marslen-Wilson,et al.  Sentence Perception as an Interactive Parallel Process , 1975, Science.

[5]  W. Chafe Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view , 1976 .

[6]  G. Beattie,et al.  Contextual Probability and Word Frequency as Determinants of Pauses and Errors in Spontaneous Speech , 1979 .

[7]  Charles N. Li,et al.  Subject and topic , 1979 .

[8]  G. Beattie Planning units in spontaneous speech: some evidence from hesitation in speech and speaker gaze direction in conversation , 1979 .

[9]  J. G. Snodgrass,et al.  A standardized set of 260 pictures: norms for name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. , 1980, Journal of experimental psychology. Human learning and memory.

[10]  B. Fischhoff,et al.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory , 1980 .

[11]  Stanley Feldstein,et al.  Of speech and time : temporal speech patterns in interpersonal contexts , 1981 .

[12]  V. Milstein,et al.  The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales , 1987 .

[13]  Roger K. Moore Computer Speech and Language , 1986 .

[14]  W. Marslen-Wilson Functional parallelism in spoken word-recognition , 1987, Cognition.

[15]  Jeanette K. Gundel Universals of topic-comment structure , 1988 .

[16]  Michael Hammond,et al.  Studies in Syntactic Typology , 1988 .

[17]  M. Farah Visual Agnosia: Disorders of Object Recognition and What They Tell Us about Normal Vision , 1990 .

[18]  E. Prince The ZPG Letter: Subjects, Definiteness, and Information-status , 1992 .

[19]  Matthew Flatt,et al.  PsyScope: An interactive graphic system for designing and controlling experiments in the psychology laboratory using Macintosh computers , 1993 .

[20]  H. H. Clark,et al.  On the Course of Answering Questions , 1993 .

[21]  F. Rauscher,et al.  The Vocabularies of Academia , 1994 .

[22]  M. Swerts,et al.  Prosody as a Marker of Information Flow in Spoken Discourse , 1994 .

[23]  Julie C. Sedivy,et al.  Eye movements as a window into real-time spoken language comprehension in natural contexts , 1995, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[24]  Julie C. Sedivy,et al.  Subject Terms: Linguistics Language Eyes & eyesight Cognition & reasoning , 1995 .

[25]  Sharon L. Oviatt,et al.  Predicting spoken disfluencies during human-computer interaction , 1995, Comput. Speech Lang..

[26]  S. Brennan,et al.  THE FEELING OF ANOTHER'S KNOWING : PROSODY AND FILLED PAUSES AS CUES TO LISTENERS ABOUT THE METACOGNITIVE STATES OF SPEAKERS , 1995 .

[27]  Robbert-Jan Beun,et al.  Filled pauses as markers of discourse structure , 1996, Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96.

[28]  Julie C. Sedivy,et al.  Using eye movements to study spoken language comprehension: Evidence for visually mediated incremental interpretation. , 1996 .

[29]  Jean E. Fox Tree,et al.  Pronouncing “the” as “thee” to signal problems in speaking , 1997, Cognition.

[30]  Paul D. Allopenna,et al.  Tracking the Time Course of Spoken Word Recognition Using Eye Movements: Evidence for Continuous Mapping Models , 1998 .

[31]  Timothy S. Paek,et al.  Definite Reference and Mutual Knowledge: Process Models of Common Ground in Comprehension , 1998 .

[32]  H. H. Clark,et al.  Repeating Words in Spontaneous Speech , 1998, Cognitive Psychology.

[33]  Brian MacWhinney,et al.  The emergence of language. , 1999 .

[34]  G. Altmann,et al.  Incremental interpretation at verbs: restricting the domain of subsequent reference , 1999, Cognition.

[35]  Jennifer E. Arnold,et al.  Heaviness vs. newness: The effects of structural complexity and discourse status on constituent ordering , 2015 .

[36]  D. Barr,et al.  Taking Perspective in Conversation: The Role of Mutual Knowledge in Comprehension , 2000, Psychological science.

[37]  D. Barr Trouble in mind: paralinguistic indices of effort and uncertainty in communication , 2001 .

[38]  S. Brennan,et al.  Disfluency Rates in Conversation: Effects of Age, Relationship, Topic, Role, and Gender , 2001, Language and speech.

[39]  S. Schachter,et al.  Speech Disfluency and the Structure of Knowledge , 1991 .

[40]  M. Tanenhaus,et al.  Time Course of Frequency Effects in Spoken-Word Recognition: Evidence from Eye Movements , 2001, Cognitive Psychology.

[41]  H. H. Clark,et al.  Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking , 2002, Cognition.

[42]  Jean E. Fox Tree,et al.  Interpreting Pauses and Ums at Turn Exchanges , 2002 .

[43]  F. Ferreira,et al.  How incremental is language production? Evidence from the production of utterances requiring the computation of arithmetic sums , 2002 .

[44]  M. Tanenhaus,et al.  Accent and reference resolution in spoken-language comprehension , 2002 .

[45]  M. Tanenhaus,et al.  Circumscribing Referential Domains during Real-Time Language Comprehension , 2002 .

[46]  Paul Boersma,et al.  Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer , 2002 .

[47]  Maryellen C. MacDonald,et al.  The use of "that" in the Production and Comprehension of Object Relative Clauses , 2003 .

[48]  Paul Boersma,et al.  Praat: doing phonetics by computer , 2003 .

[49]  Dan Jurafsky,et al.  Effects of disfluencies, predictability, and utterance position on word form variation in English conversation. , 2003, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[50]  Karl G. D. Bailey,et al.  Disfluencies affect the parsing of garden-path sentences , 2003 .

[51]  Jennifer E. Arnold,et al.  The Old and Thee, uh, New , 2004, Psychological science.

[52]  M. Pickering,et al.  Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue , 2004, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[53]  M. Tanenhaus,et al.  Looking at the rope when looking for the snake: Conceptually mediated eye movements during spoken-word recognition , 2005, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[54]  M. Swerts,et al.  Audiovisual prosody and feeling of knowing , 2005 .

[55]  Emiel Krahmer,et al.  How Children and Adults Produce and Perceive Uncertainty in Audiovisual Speech , 2005, Language and speech.

[56]  Silvia P. Gennari,et al.  Acquisition of Negation and Quantification: Insights From Adult Production and Comprehension , 2006, Language acquisition.

[57]  P. Boersma Praat : doing phonetics by computer (version 4.4.24) , 2006 .

[58]  D. Barr,et al.  Perspective taking and the coordination of meaning in language use , 2006 .

[59]  Robin L. Hill,et al.  Eye movements : a window on mind and brain , 2007 .

[60]  Michael K. Tanenhaus,et al.  The influence of visual processing on phonetically driven saccades in the “visual world” paradigm , 2007 .