WHO:	BCS Lunch Talk: Jennifer Arnold
TOPIC:	"What happens when you hear "um": Disfluency effects in comprehension"
ABSTRACT:	Most research on the rapid mental processes that underlie language processing has been limited to the study of scripted, fluent, utterances. Yet speakers are often disfluent, for example saying "thee uh candle" instead of "the candle". In a series of eyetracking experiments, I show that disfluency impacts on-line reference comprehension, creating biases toward objects that are relatively difficult to name. First, disfluent speech gives rise to a bias toward new (unmentioned) objects, compared with the normal bias toward given (previously mentioned) information with fluent speech. Second, disfluency creates a bias toward novel, difficult to describe objects. These biases affect the earliest moments of reference comprehension, as disfluency information is integrated with unfolding lexical information. Subsequent studies investigate the role of prosody in the perception of disfluency, and questions about the mechanism underlying these effects. 
WHEN:	12/3/2003 12:00:00 PM
WHERE:	Meliora 269

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