Partner-Specific Adaptation in Disfluency Processing

Area of Science:

• Cognitive psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Speech perception

Background:

• Speech disfluencies (e.g., "uh", "um") often signal difficulty in word retrieval.
• Listeners typically associate disfluencies with unexpected or complex items and fluency with familiar ones.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether listeners' expectations of disfluencies are fixed or adaptable.
• To determine if listeners adjust their predictions based on a speaker's specific disfluency patterns within a given context.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted where participants listened to object-naming instructions.
• Disfluency occurrence was manipulated in relation to novel versus familiar object references.
• Listener expectations were measured via eye-tracking (gaze behavior).

Main Results:

• Listeners showed stronger predictions of familiar objects following fluent speech and novel objects following disfluent speech when these patterns were predictive.
• These predictive expectations were weaker in non-predictive conditions.
• Adaptation of expectations occurred even in a multi-talker setting.

Conclusions:

• Listeners flexibly interpret speech disfluencies based on recent contextual experience with a specific talker.
• Disfluency processing is not static but dynamically adjusted based on learned predictive cues.
• This highlights the adaptive nature of human speech comprehension.