Fig. 3.

Activation and decay parameters for the situation leading to stalling for a PW consisting of a function word preceding a content word. The solid lines represent the activation states for the function word (left) and content word (right) at the point where the speaker has just finished uttering the function word. The dotted lines indicate the activation for the content word still has some way to go before it reaches full activation. Stalling results in this case because the function word has decayed but activation is still greater than the activation for the following content word and, consequently, the function word is repeated.