Fluency and Disfluency

Abstract

The word ‘fluency’ is used in many different ways and is a crucial aspect not only of typical speech but also of speech pathology and second language learning. To understand how speech can be produced fluently and what levels of production are important for fluent speech, it is important to consider what can go wrong in the processes that underlie speech production. To this end, this chapter considers how and why speech can become disfluent, referring to levels of processing in a standard model of production. Hesitation and errors can arise at any level of speech production from conceptualization, through syntactic and morpho-phonological encoding, to articulation. In all, it seems necessary to be able to talk about fluency (and therefore disfluency) on at least two levels: planning fluency (referring to smoothness of the internal processes) and surface fluency (referring to smoothness of overt speech).