Filled pauses as cues to the complexity of following phrases

Corpus based studies of spontaneous speech showed that filled pauses tended to precede relatively long and complex constituents. We examined whether listeners made use of such a tendency in speech processing. We tested the hypothesis that when listeners heard filled pauses they tended to expect a relatively long and complex phrase to follow. In the experiment participants listened to sentences referring to both simple and compound shapes presented on a computer screen. Their task was to press a button as soon as they had identified the shape that they heard. The sentences involved two factors: complexity and fluency. As the complexity factor, a half of