Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

There is evidence that the process of executing a plannedutterance involves the use of both preceding-context and top-down cues. Utterance-initial words are cued only by the top-down plan. In contrast, non-initial words are cued both bytop-down cues and preceding-context cues. Co-existence ofboth cue types raises the question of how they interact duringlearning. We argue that this interaction is competitive: itemsthat tend to be preceded by predictive preceding-context cuesare harder to activate from the plan without this predictivecontext. A novel computational model of this competition isdeveloped. The model is tested on a corpus of repetitiondisfluencies and shown to account for the influences onpatterns of restarts during production. In particular, this modelpredicts a novel Initiation Effect: following an interruption,speakers re-initiate production from words that tend to occurin utterance-initial position, even when they are not initial inthe interrupted utterance.