Examining the Influence of Disfluencies on Reaction Time : An Exploratory Study Investigating the Impact of Entropy in Language

Abstract: The current study aimed to investigate the effects of disfluencies, specifically filled pauses (FP) and unfilled pauses (UP), on reaction time (RT) to target words and hyponyms of target hypernyms(targets = target words + hyponyms of target hypernyms). Two experiments were conducted, withthe first experiment examining the impact of disfluencies on RTs to target words in utterances, whilethe second experiment explored their effect on hyponyms of target hypernyms. The experiments wereconducted on six participants, comprising two females and four males, following a within-subjectdesign.Unlike previous studies that have examined disfluencies in the Swedish language, this study dis-tinguished between two categories of filled pauses, namely ehm (E:m, @:m, œ:m, or æ:m) and öh (E:,@:, œ:, or æ:). However, the results revealed that this distinction had no significant effect on RTs.Conversely, a significant difference in RTs was observed between genders, with women exhibitingfaster reaction times compared to men. Participants generally reacted more swiftly to target wordsthan to hyponyms of target hypernyms.Interestingly, filled pauses were found to reduce reaction times to target hypernyms compared tounfilled pauses. However, they did not demonstrate a similar effect on reaction times to target words.Caution should be exercised in interpreting these results due to the limited sample size. Nevertheless,these findings have intriguing implications for the entropy hypothesis (EH) and attention-heighteninghypothesis (AHH) concerning filled pause production.