The role of inhibition in the production of disfluencies

Abstract

Disfluency is a common occurrence in speech and is generally thought to be related to difficulty in the production system. One unexplored issue is the extent to which inhibition is required to prevent incorrect speech plans from being articulated. Therefore, we examined disfluency production in participants with attentiondeficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which is linked to deficits in inhibitory function and response suppression (Nigg, 2001). Participants completed a sentence production task in which they were presented with two pictures and a verb and their task was to produce a sentence. If inhibition plays a role in preventing incorrect speech plans, we would expect ADHD participants to produce more repetition and repair disfluencies than would non-ADHD controls. The results showed that one subtype of ADHD (i.e., the combined) produced more repair disfluencies as task demands increased. We conclude that the production system relies on inhibitory control in order to prevent errors in language production.

The effect of syntactic complexity on fluency: Comparing actives and passives in L1 and L2 speech

“…Ellis and Yuan, 2005). The direct relation between syntactic complexity and utterance fluency, however, has thus far only been investigated in native speaker performance (Engelhardt et al, 2010). The current short research article compares the effect of syntactic complexity in first language (L1) and L2 speaking fluency, in answering the following research question:…”

“…They also measured formulation times and report that passives are formulated slower than actives. Engelhardt et al (2010) measured how participants' fluency was affected by producing passives versus actives, much like the current study will do. They compared the speech production of healthy and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) native English participants, with the goal of investigating the role of inhibition in the production of disfluencies.…”

Sources of individual differences in the speed of naming objects and actions: The contribution of executive control

“…Moreover, evidence suggests that brain-damaged patients with deficient inhibiting abilities have difficulty producing words under conditions of high lexical competition in a word generation task (e.g., Badre, Poldrack, Paré-Blagoev, Insler, & Wagner, 2005;Thompson-Schill et al, 1998). Studies of ADHD have indicated that deficient inhibiting abilities caused disfluencies during sentence production (e.g., Engelhardt, Corley, Nigg, & Ferreira, 2010). In the ageing literature, age-related declining inhibiting abilities have been associated with increased lexical competition effects in both spoken word recognition and production (e.g., Taler, Aaron, Steinmetz, & Pisoni, 2010).…”

Processing limitations in L2 fluency

“…Pausing and speed have been shown to be relatively good markers of (dis)fluency (Bosker et al, 2013;De Jong et al, 2015;Freed, 2000;Kahng, 2014). On the other hand, the repairs (false starts, repetitions, replacements, and reformulations) have been studied to a much lesser extent, and their relationship to L2 proficiency has been questioned (Engelhardt et al, 2010;Gilabert, 2007;Kormos, 1999;Lennon, 1990). These results have important implications for the current study as well, when considering the different types of disfluencies (inaccuracies) and proficiency.…”

“…Second language (L2) fluency has received growing interest in recent years (e.g., Akamatsu, 2008;Bosker, Pinget, Quené, Sanders & De Jong, 2013;De Jong, Groenhout, Schoonen & Hulstijn, 2015;Engelhardt, Corley, Nigg & Ferreira, 2010;Housen & Kuiken, 2009;Kahng, 2014;Kame'enui & Simmons, 2001;Riggenbach, 2000;Segalowitz, 2010;Snellings, Van Gelderen & De Glopper, 2002). No clear consensus has been reached, though, on what is meant by fluency of language use.…”