Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Speech disfluencies occur frequently in spontaneous speech but their source is unclear. Disfluencies can take severalforms, most commonly as verbalized disfluencies such as “um”, “uh”, and “so”, as well as silent pauses. In the presentexploratory study we examined the relationship between disfluencies as distinct entities, individual differences in workingmemory capacity, and linguistic markers of complexity. We found that disfluencies diverge in their relationship with thesevariables. The “um” disfluency was most closely related to working memory capacity and linguistic complexity. The “uh”disfluency was associated with infrequent word production. The “so” disfluency predicted of the number of words produced.Silent disfluencies were not related to working memory capacity. However, micro-pauses were related to word production,and macro-pauses were negatively correlated with the “so” disfluency. Results are discussed in terms of potential relationshipsbetween disfluencies and speech production processes.