Muhlack, Beeke; Elmers, Mikey; Drenhaus, Heiner; van Os, Marjolein; Werner, Raphael; Ryzhova, Margarita; Möbius, Bernd
Revisiting recall effects of filler particles in German and English
Proceedings of Interspeech 2021, Interspeech, pp. 3979-3983, Brno, Czechia, 2021.
This paper reports on two experiments that partially replicate an experiment by Fraundorf and Watson (2011, J Mem. Lang.) on the recall effect of filler particles. Their subjects listened to three passages of a story, either with or without filler particles, which they had to retell afterwards. They analysed the subject‘ retelling in terms of whether important plot points were remem- bered or not. For their English data, they found that filler parti- cles facilitate the recall of the plot points significantly compared to stories that did not include filler particles. As this seems to be a convincing experimental design, we aimed at evaluating this method as a web-based experiment which may, if found to be suitable, easily be applied to other languages. Furthermore, we investigated whether their results are found in German as well (Experiment 1), and evaluated whether filler duration has an ef- fect on recall performance (Experiment 2). Our results could not replicate the findings of the original study: in fact, the op- posite effect was found for German. In Experiment 1, participants performed better on recall in the fluent condition, while no significant results were found for English in Experiment 2.