Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Disfluency in speech leads listeners, even two-year-oldchildren, to expect the speaker to refer to novel and discourse-new objects. Previous evidence suggests this link betweendisfluency and discourse novelty is not driven simply bytracking of co-occurrence statistics connecting disfluency withreference to a new object, but also by integrating extra-linguistic information about the speaker’s perspective. Weasked whether children can attribute a speaker’s disfluency todifferent sources – language planning difficulty vs. distractionfrom the conversation. We tested children’s processing ofdisfluency when interacting with an engaged versus adistracted speaker. When the engaged speaker was disfluent,children looked more at a novel and discourse-new image thanat a familiar and just-named image, consistent with the existingliterature. This disfluency effect was attenuated when thespeaker was distracted, suggesting that four-year-old childrencan flexibly attribute a speaker’s disfluency to different sourcesin online interpretation of disfluent speech.