2018-07-272018-07-272017(2017) Make your memory work for it: The effect of increased speech rate and disfluencies on accuracy of story recall, no. 79.https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/7697Cluttering is an under-investigated fluency disorder characterized by excessive disfluencies and rapid speech rate. Most research examines these features from a production or low-level contextual perception viewpoint, rather than investigating their effects on more complex discourse comprehension. Models of discourse comprehension emphasize the involvement of working memory in recall, but it is unknown how these factors interact with characteristics of cluttering. This study therefore aimed to fill the literature gap with regards to repetition disfluencies and rapid speech rate at the discourse recall level and investigate their relationship with individual working memory span. The study replicated the methodology from Fraundorf and Watson [2011, The disfluent discourse: Effects of filled pauses on recall. Journal of Memory and Language. vol. 65, no. 2, pp. 161-175]. Forty participants listened to 4 recordings of passages paraphrased from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in one of the four conditions (Control, Speed, Disfluent, and Combined) and were asked to recall the story and complete a rating of the speed, fluency, and comprehensibility. Results suggest that excessive disfluencies and increased speech rate significantly reduce a listener's recall of information from discourse. This supports the prioritisation of speech rate in intervention goal setting. No relationship between working memory spans and recall were observed.79Thesis