In work by Bailey and Ferreira (2003), listeners who heard filled pause disfluencies (i.e., “uh uh”) at structural non-boundary locations (e.g., (2) below) judged the sentence stimuli as ungrammatical more often than when the disfluency was at (or very near to) a boundary location (e.g., (1) below). They interpreted this as evidence of a structural signalling effect of filled pauses.

(1) [While [the man hunted] the uh uh deer ran into the woods].
(2) [While [the man hunted] the deer uh uh ran into the woods].

With the rapid rise of social media, filled pauses are being increasingly observed even in print material like blogs and messaging. Therefore, it is an open question whether printed filled pauses may have comparable effects on readers. The present work seeks to examine whether the structural signalling effect extends to the reading of written stimuli. Similar to the previous work, readers judged sentences like (2) as ungrammatical more often. Furthermore, in a self-paced reading paradigm, participants’ reading times were slower in the first three regions (words) after a printed disfluency in a nonboundary location. This suggests the effect is robust across perceptual paradigms.

This research was conducted via Amazon Mechanical Turk and the results were reported at the CUNY 2019 Human Sentence Processing Conference.