Running head: INHIBITION IN DISFLUENCY PRODUCTION The role of inhibition in the production of disfluencies

Disfluency is a common occurrence in speech, and generally thought to be related to difficulty in the production system. One unexplored issue is the extent to which inhibition is required to prevent incorrect speech plans from being articulated. Therefore, we examined disfluency production in participants with AttentionDeficit/Hyper-Activity Disorder (ADHD), which is linked to deficits in inhibitory function and response suppression (Nigg, 2001). Participants completed a sentence production task in which they were presented with two pictures and a verb, and their task was to produce a sentence. If inhibition plays a role in preventing incorrect speech plans, then we expected ADHD participants to produce more repetition and repair disfluencies than non-ADHD controls. The results showed that one sub-type of ADHD (i.e. the combined) produced more repair disfluencies as task demands increased. We conclude that the production system relies on inhibitory control in order to prevent errors in language production.