Abstract
During the next Praat-groep meeting, I will contribute to the notion that it's not just about what you say, but also about how you say it. The focus here is on one particular aspect of speech performance, namely the (dis)fluency of speech. I will present results from two eye-tracking experiments targeting the effect that disfluencies may have on the predictive mechanisms of the listener. I will demonstrate that disfluencies may lead listeners to predict a more complex referent (relative to fluent speech). However, when participants listened to a non-native speaker, no effect of disfluency could be established. These two experiments show that (i) listeners are sensitive to the fluency of speech, and (ii) listeners are flexible in modulating the use of disfluencies based on speaker knowledge.
