Hindle [1] suggested that false starts and repetitions should be handled differently in a computational account of the processing of the two kinds of disfluency, and there is behavioural evidence that the human sentence processing mechanism likewise honours this distinction [2]. The same dichotomy was also evident in the electrophysiological data reported here. False starts and repetitions were identified in a corpus of spontaneous speech. Control items for the false starts were prepared by excising the reparanda to yield apparently fluent items. Continuous EEG was recorded while subjects listened to items containing the false starts, fluent false start controls, and first and second tokens of repetitions. Compared with identical words in their fluent controls, the false starts elicited a positive response similar to the P600 which is reported for syntactically anomalous words [3, 4, 5]. By contrast, second tokens of repetitions in general resulted in increased amplitude of the N400 [6]; yet, when the same repetitions were excised from context and presented listfashion, they elicited the positive-going response which has been reported by other researchers [7].
Cite as: McAllister, J., Cato-Symonds, S., Johnson, B. (2001) Listeners' ERP responses to false starts and repetitions inspontaneous speech. Proc. ITRW on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS 2001), 65-68
@inproceedings{mcallister01_diss,
author={Jan McAllister and Susan Cato-Symonds and Blake Johnson},
title={{Listeners' ERP responses to false starts and repetitions inspontaneous speech}},
year=2001,
booktitle={Proc. ITRW on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS 2001)},
pages={65--68}
}