Semantic interference affects speech production by increasing disfluencies, not errors

Several studies showed that different types of disfluencies occur depending on the language production stage at which people experience difficulties. The current study combined a network task and a picture-word interference task to analyse whether lexical-semantic difficulty triggers errors and disfluencies in connected-speech production. The participants produced more disfluencies in the presence of a semantically related distractor word compared to an unrelated distractor word, while few semantic errors were made. These results support the hypothesis that difficulties at distinct stages of language production lead to distinct patterns of disfluencies, with lexical-semantic difficulties leading to self-corrections and silent pauses. The results also have implications regarding the role of the monitoring system in connected-speech production.