Abstract
Past research has shown that speakers are perceived as less credible if they emit high levels of speech disfluencies. Recently, researchers have replicated the effects of simplified habit reversal to treat speech disfluencies for adults. To our knowledge, an antecedent analysis has not been conducted to identify the public speaking conditions that might influence disfluency rates. Therefore, we piloted an establishing operation analysis for idiosyncratic speech disfluencies emitted by five college students by manipulating common stimulus dimensions—audience size, audience type, and topic difficulty—in mock public speaking scenarios. We used a pairwise design and measured speech disfluencies, silent pauses, covariation, and speech rate. The results indicated that a larger audience and an audience including an authority figure functioned as reflexive conditioned motivating operations (CMO-Rs) that increased the reinforcing value of avoiding or escaping silence for most participants, and presenting on academic topics functioned as a CMO-R for one participant.