Effects of divided attention on the production of filled pauses and repetitions

The purpose of the present study was to examine effects of divided attentio n on the production of Filled pauses and repetifions. Attention was divided by means of a dual-task paradigm. Eighteen nonstuttering adult subjects pe rformed a picture story-telling task, with and without simultaneously perfo rming a tactile-form recognition task. Results indicate that the number of filled pauses and repetitions increased in a situation of divided attention . This suggests that the production of filled pauses and repetitions, which are considered to be reactions to problems in speech planning, is governed by processes that operate relatively independently of the available attent ional resources. It was speculated that these disfluencies could be automat ic reactions to the increased planning difficulties induced by the concurre nt task.