Attention orienting effects of hesitations in speech: evidence from ERPs.

Full Abstract

Filled-pause disfluencies such as um and er affect listeners' comprehension, possibly mediated by attentional mechanisms (J. E. Fox Tree, 2001). However, there is little direct evidence that hesitations affect attention. The current study used an acoustic manipulation of continuous speech to induce event-related potential components associated with attention (mismatch negativity [MMN] and P300) during the comprehension of fluent and disfluent utterances. In fluent cases, infrequently occurring acoustically manipulated target words gave rise to typical MMN and P300 components when compared to nonmanipulated controls. In disfluent cases, where targets were preceded by natural sounding hesitations culminating in the filled pause er, an MMN (reflecting a detection of deviance) was still apparent for manipulated words, but there was little evidence of a subsequent P300. This suggests that attention was not reoriented to deviant words in disfluent cases. A subsequent recognition test showed that nonmanipulated words were more likely to be remembered if they had been preceded by a hesitation. Taken together, these results strongly implicate attention in an account of disfluency processing: Hesitations orient listeners' attention, with consequences for the immediate processing and later representation of an utterance.

Author information

Author/s: Collard, Philip (P); Corley, Martin (M); MacGregor, Lucy J (LJ); Donaldson, David I (DI);

Affiliation: School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. p.collard(-atsign-)sms.ed.ac.uk

Grants: (Agency:Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition (J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-May; vol 34 (issue 3) : pp 696-702

Dates: Created 2008/04/30; Completed 2008/08/22;

PMID: 18444766, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 2/18/2009, IMS Date: )

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