After reviewing situational and demographic factors that have been argued to affect speakers' disfluency rates, we examined disfluency rates in a corpus of task-oriented conversations ( Schober & Carstensen, 2001) with variables that might affect fluency rates. These factors included: speakers' ages (young, middle-aged, and older), task roles (director vs. matcher in a referential communication task), difficulty of topic domain (abstract geometric figures vs. photographs of children), relationships between speakers (married vs. strangers), and gender(each pair consisted of a man and a woman). Older speakers produced only slightly $higher disfluency rates than young and middle-aged speakers. Overall, disfluency rates were higher both when speakers acted as directors and when they discussed abstract figures, confirming that disfluencies are associated with an increase in planning difficulty. However, fillers (such as u h) were distributed somewhat differently than repeats or restarts, supporting the idea that fillers may be a resource for or a consequence of interpersonal coordination.

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Listeners often encounter disfluencies (like uhs and repairs) in spontaneous speech. How is comprehension affected? In four experiments, listeners followed fluent and disfluent instructions to select an object on a graphical display. Disfluent instructions included mid-word interruptions (Move to the yel-purple square), mid-word interruptions with fillers (Move to the yel-uh, purple square), and between-word interruptions (Move to the yellow-purple square). Relative to the target color word, listeners selected the target object more quickly, and no less accurately, after hearing mid-word interruptions with fillers than after hearing comparable fluent utterances as well as utterances that replaced disfluencies with pauses of equal length. Hearing less misleading information before the interruption site led listeners to make fewer errors, and fillers allowed for more time after the interruption for listeners to cancel misleading information. The information available in disfluencies can help listeners compensate for disruptions and delays in spontaneous utterances.