Prosodic context-based analysis of disfluencies

This work explores prosodic cues of disfluencies in a corpus of university lectures. Results show three significant (p < 0.001) trends: pitch and energy slopes are significantly different between the disfluency and the onset of fluency; those features are also relevant to disfluency type differentiation; and they do not seem to be a speakereffect. The best combination of linguistic features one can use to better predict the onset of fluency are pitch and energy resets as well as the presence of a silent pause immediately before a repair. Our results, thus, point out to a strategy of prosodic contrast rather than of parallelism. With this work we hope to contribute to the analysis of the prosodic behaviors in the production of the so called disfluencies and in the fluency repair in European Portuguese.