Halt command in word retrieval

In this study, occurrences and temporal patterns of five types of disfluencies were analyzed that show a common feature on the surface. All of them have some kind of interruption of content words followed by some continuation. The purpose was to show whether the place of interruption of the word articulation and the durational patterns of the editing phases are characteristic of re-starts, false starts, slips of the tongue, pauses within words, and prolongations. More than 1,400 instances were processed. Both (i) the number of pronounced segments of abandoned words and the duration of the corresponding editing phases are characteristic of a specific disfluency type, and (ii) speakers select a strategy to overcome their speech planning difficulties most economically.