Predictions of listeners' in response to speakers’ repairs: Evidence from eye movements

Abstract

There is now considerable evidence that upon hearing an utterance, listeners are able to make predictions about what is to follow. However, given the frequency of disfluency in normal speech we may wonder how this effects the predictions that listeners may make. While there is a growing body of literature concerned with how disfluencies may influence comprehension, there has been relatively little attention given to the case of repairs. The present paper presents an exploratory study using the visual world paradigm to investigate the predictions listeners make when speakers appear to change their mind while giving an instruction. We manipulated the lengths of the pauses and whether or not a retrace was present in the repair and found that this had an effect on both fixation likelihoods and their onsets. It is suggested that these findings may provide questions for future research, of which the visual world paradigm may continue to be a valuable tool.