09 May 2006

Hannele Nicholson

Spontaneous speech is replete with disfluencies, pauses, hesitations, restarts and less than ideal deliveries of information. But why do disfluencies occur? One hypothesis, which I will refer to as the Strategic Modelling View, suggests that disfluencies are designed by the speaker to signal commitment to a listener. An alternative view, which I will call the Cognitive Burden View, suggests that disfluency is the result of an overburdened language production system. During the talk, I will compare and contrast these theories by explaining data from three Map Task experiments involving eye gaze, a measure of speaker attention, and disfluency.

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