Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is well-established that when people process sentences fluently, they are more likely to believe the sentences are true.It has also been shown that sentences which include disfluencies improve peoples memory for the sentences content.We sought to test whether both of these effects were present simultaneously. In Experiment 1, we found that speechdisfluencies do not appear to always aid memory, but they do impact participants truth judgments. In Experiment 2 wefound that this impact on truth judgments may not be due to processing fluency, but rather due to reasoning about thespeakers certainty. We found a similar effect on truth judgments when participants were presented with sentences thatwere fluent but had rising (i.e. uncertain) intonation in comparison with falling intonation. In both cases, the effect waslocalized to only the sentences that had the cue, rather than to all sentences that the speaker produced.