Effects of divided attention on the production of filled pauses and repetitions.

The purpose of the present study was to examine effects of divided attention on the production of filled pauses and repetitions. Attention was divided by means of a dual-task paradigm. Eighteen nonstuttering adult subjects performed a picture story-telling task, with and without simultaneously performing a tactile-form recognition task. Results indicate that the number of filled pauses and repetitions increased in a situation of divided attention. This suggests that the production of filled pauses and repetitions, which are considered to be reactions to problems in speech planning, is governed by processes that operate relatively independently of the available attentional resources. It was speculated that these disfluencies could be automatic reactions to the increased planning difficulties induced by the concurrent task.