Complexity Cues or Attention Triggers? Repetitions and Editing Terms for Native Speakers of French.

A growing stream of research shows evidence of the metalinguistic information that disfluencies (silent and filled pauses, repetitions, false-starts, repairs, etc.) can display to listeners. As a result, disfluencies may work as fluent devices. By means of a decision task latencies, this study investigates whether lexical repetition co-occurring with an editing term affects the perception of native speakers of French. There is a lack of consensus in the literature: do disfluencies trigger conceptual priming of complex entity or act simply as attention cues? Results from multiple analysis of variance and linear mixed-effect modelling show that the presence of a disfluency triggers a faster response from the participant, however complex the following noun-phrase might be, supporting the hypothesis that repetition and co-occurring editing terms act as cognitive signposts rather than as cues of complexity of an upcoming event.