RUB » Faculty of Psychology » Language and Cognition

The research goal of this group is to describe how cognitive and short-term memory loads affect speech production and perception. More specifically, it is assumed that during speech production the temporal coordination between premotor level speech planning and coding processes can be disturbed by concurrent cognitive activities. Empirical indicators for these disturbances are speech disfluencies, breath taking, syntactic and semantic complexity, and semantic coherence. These effects are studied in experimentally controlled settings and in natural discourse. Additionally it is investigated whether the speech of persons who stutter and of persons who do not stutter as well as of elderly in comparison to younger persons is differentially susceptible to cognitive load conditions.