Abstract
This chapter examines the relative accessibility of different referents to a particular speaker during language comprehension, focusing on disfluency effects and how new information can be accessed. It describes experiments in which people’s eye movements to different physical objects in a scene were recorded while the degree of fluency of pronunciation of the referent in the utterance was manipulated. It shows that the fluency of production of a referent affects interpretation of that referent and that speech “errors” such as disfluent speech can offer insights into how the human production and comprehension of language work. The chapter also discusses the discourse-history approach to accessibility in the context of reference comprehension, along with the expectancy hypothesis of accessibility.
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