Phonetic Consequences of Speech Disfluency

Phonetic evidence for two types of disfluency

Disfluency, such as pause (silences), filled pause (e.g., ‘um’, ‘uh’), repetition (e.g., ‘the the’) and cutoff word (e.g., ‘hori[zontal]-’), is a common part of human speech that occurs at a rate of 6 to 10 per 100 words [2, 5]. According to one model of speech production [8], there are two types of disfluency: disfluency at the internal planning stage (e.g., wordretrieval difficulties), and di...

Phonetic Exponents of Disfluency in German Spontaneous Speech*

A comparison of disfluency patterns in normal and stuttered speech

While speech disfluencies are commonly found in every speaker’s speech, stuttering is a language disorder characterized by an abnormally high rate of speech aberrations, including prolongation, cessation, and repetition of speech segments [5]. However, despite the obvious differences between stuttered and normal speech, identifying the crucial qualities that identify stuttered speech remains a ...

Abnormal speech sound representation in persistent developmental stuttering.

OBJECTIVES To determine whether adults with persistent developmental stuttering (PDS) have auditory perceptual deficits. METHODS The authors compared the mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related brain potential elicited to simple tone (frequency and duration) and phonetic contrasts in a sample of PDS subjects with that recorded in a sample of paired fluent control subjects. RESULTS Subjects ...

Prosodic parallelism as a cue to repetition and error correction disfluency

Complex disfluencies that involve the repetition or correction of words are frequent in conversational speech, with repetition disfluencies alone accounting for over 20% of disfluencies. These disfluencies generally do not lead to comprehension errors for human listeners. We propose that the frequent occurrence of parallel prosodic features in the reparandum (REP) and alteration (ALT) intervals...