Disfluencies and Eye MOvements during Speech: what can they reveal about language production? (DEMOS)

Speech production is full of disfluencies, which are “henomena that interrupt the flow of speech and do not add propositional content to an utterance” However, it is not well understood why speakers are so often disfluent. To reveal the underlying causes of disfluency, most approaches attempt to relate the pattern of disfluencies to difficulties at specific levels of language production. The current project will also investigate disfluency by manipulating different levels of production. In addition, we will bring together different accounts of disfluency by 1) capturing monitoring or stalling strategy using eye-tracking and 2) identifying the role of non-linguistic cognitive functions and individual differences through neuropsychological tests. Findings will open new avenues for the investigation and understanding of discourse production, in normal and in clinical populations.