How Listeners Infer the Causes of Disfluent Speech

Abstract

The effect of disfluencies on listeners’ judgements of the confidence and correctness of a speaker was measured and the mechanisms used by listeners to infer the causes of these disfluencies were investigated. Listeners heard speakers give answers to questions and rated how likely it was that the speaker had given the correct answer and how confident the speaker had sounded. They were told that one speaker had a speech problem to investigate whether this affected their ratings. Disfluent answers were judged as less confident and less likely to be correct than definite answers. The information that one of the speakers had a speech problem had no effect on listeners’ ratings. It is concluded that this suggests that listeners automatically attribute the cause of disfluent speech to retrieval problems.