Supporting materials for Arnold, Tanenhaus, Altmann & Fagnano 2004
Arnold, J. E., Tanenhaus, M. K., Altmann, R., & Fagnano, M. (2004). The Old and Thee, uh, New. Psychological Science. 578-582.
ABSTRACT—Most research on the rapid mental processes of online
language processing has been limited to the study of idealized,
fluent utterances. Yet speakers are often disfluent, for
example, saying ‘‘thee, uh, candle’’ instead of ‘‘the candle.’’ By
monitoring listeners’ eye movements to objects in a display, we
demonstrated that the fluency of an article (‘‘thee uh’’ vs. ‘‘the’’)
affects how listeners interpret the following noun. With a fluent
article, listeners were biased toward an object that had been
mentioned previously, but with a disfluent article, they were
biased toward an object that had not been mentioned. These
biases were apparent as early as lexical information became
available, showing that disfluency affects the basic processes of
decoding linguistic input.