Disfluency phenomena in an apprenticeship corpus

This papers presents a study carried out on an apprenticeship corpus. It features dialogues between air traffic controllers in formation and "pseudo-pilots". "Pseudo-pilots" are people (often instructors) that simulate the behavior of real pilots, in real situations. Its main specificities are the apprenticeship characteristic, and the fact that the production is subordinate to a particular phraseology. Our study is related to the many kinds of disfluency phenomena that occur in this specific corpus. We define 6 main categories of these phenomena, and take position in regard to the terminology used in literature. We then present the distribution of these categories. It appears that some of the occurrences frequencies largely differs from those observed in other studies. Our explanation is based on the corpus specificity: in reason of their responsibilities, both controllers and pseudo-pilots have to be especially careful to the mistakes they could do, since they could lead to some dramas. The remainder of our paper is dedicated to the more deepen study of a disfluency class: the "false starts". It consists of the beginning utterance of a word, that is not achieved. We show that this category consists of several sub-categories, of which we study the distribution.