Minimizing cognitive resources while executing wellpracticed motor tasks has been shown to increase automaticity and enhance performance (e.g., Beilock, Carr, Macmahon, & Starkes, 2002). Based on this principle, we examined whether more fluent speech production could be induced through a dual task paradigm that engaged working memory (WM) while speech was produced. We also considered whether effects varied for speakers who differed in their habitual degree of attentional control during speech production. Twenty fluent adults and 19 adults who stutter performed (1) a baseline speaking task, (2) a baseline WM task with manipulations of domain, load, and inter-stimulus interval (ISI), and (3) a series of dual tasks in which the speaking task was combined with each unique set of WM conditions. Results indicated a fluency benefit under dual task conditions, which was specific to atypical forms of disfluency but comparable across speaker types and manipulations of the WM task. Findings suggest that WM is associated with atypical forms of disfluency and that suppressing these resources enhances speech fluency, although further research is needed to specify the cognitive mechanism involved in this effect and clarify the nature of this association.

Reports of the relationship between aspects of cognitivecontrol and bilingual language experience in youngadults have been inconsistent. This study comparedperformance between monolingual and bilingual youngadults on working memory (WM) updating as ameasure of cognitive control and examined howdifferences in bilingual language experience manifestin updating performance. A letter N-back task with setsize and lure manipulations was used to measureupdating processes in the presence of increasedmemory load and interference. We expected to see aneffect of the bilingual experience on WM updating, aswell as within task variations related to the use ofdifferent updating mechanisms. While the monolingualand bilingual groups did not perform significantlydifferently, high non-English reading proficiencysignificantly predicted accuracy and reaction timewithin the bilingual group, particularly in high load,interference conditions. Results showed that youngadults categorized as bilingual in a broadly definedgroup may be difficult to uniformly compare to amonolingual group as they show large variations inperformance depending on their individual languageexperience.

Memory retrieval and probabilistic expectations arerecognized factors in sentence comprehension that capturetwo different critical aspects of processing difficulty: the costof retrieving and integrating previously processed elementswith the new input words and the cost of incorrect predictionsabout upcoming words or structures in a sentence. Althoughthese two factors have independently received substantialsupport from the extant literature, how they interact remainspoorly understood. The present study investigated memoryretrieval and expectation in a single experiment, pitting thesefactors against each other. Results showed a significantinterference effect in both response time to the comprehensionquestions and reading time at the last (spillover) sentenceregion. We also found that the interference effect on readingtime (but not on comprehension question response time) wascanceled when the word at the retrieval site was highlypredictable. Overall, our findings are consistent with thehypothesis of a modulatory effect of expectations on memoryretrieval and with the idea that expectation-based facilitationresults from pre-activation of the target word ahead of time.