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Setting the Stage for Disfluency: Implications of Contextual Task Framing Effects for the Design of Listening Tasks

Speech disfluencies have been shown to impact both judgments about a speaker’s competence and decisions about which source of information to rely on. However, fluency effects more broadly are highly sensitive to context: they are strongest when there is little other information available to inform judgments and decisions, and can be attenuated or even reversed by metacognitive processes. Speech is generally experienced in the context of interactions, where listeners have access to a plethora of information about the speaker and other parameters relevant to decision-making. It is hence crucial to consider how the outcomes of studies on speech disfluencies might be impacted by the framing of experimental tasks and the information available to participants. We carried out a decision-making task where participants had to choose which of two speakers, one fluent and one disfluent, had answered a trivia question correctly. The task was presented in the context of three scenarios which provided different information about the speakers. We replicated previous findings that listeners preferred fluent answers in only one of these three contexts, demonstrating the importance of task framing.