Self-monitoring strategies: the factor of age

The mental lexicon is the central mechanism of speech production process as it contains indispensable information for speaking. Speakers often face with difficulties during lexical retrieval in spontaneous speech, the examination of these disfluency phenomena may provide an insight into covert processes. The aim of the present research is to examine the selfmonitoring strategies of adults and children by analyzing two types of disfluency phenomena: false starts and false words. The data set consists of a significant amount of spontaneous speech samples from the largest Hungarian database. Results indicate that ‘age’ has a great effect both on the occurrence of disfluencies and on the strategy of repair. This research contributes to the closer exploration of self-monitoring by age and highlights the factor of language development in this respect.