Memory for Discourse Context Following Disfluency

Abstract

This study investigated how memory for the reparandum (the original, corrected speech) and the repair (the corrected portion of speech) are influenced by speech containing disfluencies, specifically repair disfluencies. A modified version of the paradigm from Lowder and Ferreira (2016) was used, in which participants listened to sentences containing either disfluent repairs (e.g., “salt, uh I mean ketchup”) or coordination structures (e.g., “salt and also ketchup”). The primary goal was to examine how the presence of disfluencies might affect memory for the reparandum and repair, with a particular focus on whether certain types of linguistic structures—such as repairs or coordination structures—might be better remembered. The results revealed that participants were most accurate in recalling the repair portion of the sentence, followed by the reparandum. Additionally, semantically related items were better remembered than unrelated distractors, indicating that meaning plays a significant role in memory encoding. These findings suggest that the reparandum, while often interrupted by disfluency, continues to linger in memory and may influence how subsequent speech is processed and recalled. Interestingly, the length of the editing phase (the pause or hesitation during disfluency) did not have a significant impact on memory performance. Furthermore, no significant differences were found between the disfluency condition and the coordination condition, suggesting that it is the role of prediction mechanisms in memory encoding that is most influential, rather than the presence of disfluency itself. These results highlight the importance of prediction in how speech is processed and remembered.