IMPRS DOCTORAL DEFENCE: Franziska Schulz

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Why are some speakers more disfluent than others?

People differ in how fluent they are when speaking, just as they differ in many other abilities. Some speakers rarely hesitate, while others more frequently produce uhs, uhms, or restart sentences entirely. These interruptions, called disfluencies, are a normal part of everyday speech and reflect the challenges of planning and producing language in real time.

This dissertation explores why some speakers are more disfluent than others. Speech fluency is influenced by a variety of factors: some relate to the speech itself, such as the frequency or the length of words, while others relate to the speaker, including inherent traits like cognitive abilities or situational demands such as the cognitive load at a given moment.

By examining these factors together, this work explores how they influence the flow of natural conversation, including the pauses and hesitations that occur along the way. Although speakers vary in how often they produce disfluencies, each person tends to show fairly consistent patterns over time. While some disfluencies can be predicted by characteristics of the speech itself, a speaker’s cognitive abilities and the demands of the situation play a larger role when speaking becomes more challenging. Taken together, disfluencies offer a unique window into how language, the speaker, and the surrounding context interact in everyday communication.

Franziska Schulz was born in Velbert, Germany, in 1996. She obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany, in 2017. She then obtained a Master’s degree in Linguistics at the University of Düsseldorf in 2020, and a joint Master’s degree in Clinical Linguistics at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, the University of Eastern Finland, Finland, and the University of Potsdam, Germany, in 2021. In 2021, she started her PhD in the Psychology of Language department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Franziska is currently looking for opportunities outside of academia.