Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

The old and thee, uh, new: disfluency and reference resolution.

Jennifer E Arnold1, Michael K Tanenhaus, Rebecca J Altmann

  • 1University of Rochester, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, NY 14627, USA. jarnold@bcs.rochester.edu

Psychological Science
|August 26, 2004
PubMed
Summary

Speech disfluency, like "thee uh," alters how listeners interpret words. Listeners showed different biases for previously mentioned objects based on article fluency, impacting language processing.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Referential Adaptation in the Face of Changing Input Frequencies: The System Wants to Return to Baseline.

Cognitive science·2026
Same author

Linguistic-visual routines and name activation in visual world studies of spoken word recognition.

Brain research·2026
Same author

Pediatric asthma specialist care utilization among marginalized children with poorly controlled asthma.

The Journal of asthma : official journal of the Association for the Care of Asthma·2025
Same author

Effect of the Telemedicine Enhanced Asthma Management-Uniting Providers (TEAM-UP) Program on Asthma Outcomes: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

The Journal of pediatrics·2025
Same author

Rethinking task importance in the visual world paradigm.

Brain research·2025
Same author

Scrutinizing reference adaptation: Do people only adapt to infrequent discourse structures?

Psychonomic bulletin & review·2025

Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Science
  • Speech Processing

Background:

  • Online language processing research often uses idealized, fluent speech.
  • Real-world speech frequently contains disfluencies, such as pauses and filled utterances.
  • Understanding the impact of disfluency on real-time language comprehension is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how speech disfluency affects on-line interpretation of linguistic input.
  • To determine if article fluency influences listeners' referential processing.

Main Methods:

  • Listeners' eye movements were monitored while they viewed objects in a display.
  • Participants processed utterances containing either fluent or disfluent articles (e.g., "the" vs. "thee uh").
  • Object interpretation was inferred from eye-gaze patterns.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Fluent articles biased listeners towards previously mentioned objects.
  • Disfluent articles shifted listener bias towards unmentioned objects.
  • These effects emerged rapidly, coinciding with lexical access.

Conclusions:

  • Speech disfluency significantly impacts the fundamental processes of language decoding.
  • Listeners' interpretation of nouns is modulated by the fluency of preceding articles.
  • Disfluency provides valuable insights into the dynamic nature of real-time language comprehension.