Acoustico-phonetic characteristics of filled pauses in spontaneous French speech: preliminary results

In the current analysis we examined the acoustic and phonetic characteristics of filled pauses in spontaneous French speech and their relationship to the prosody of the surrounding context. Two main results emerged : 1) There was no effect of the duration of filled pauses or their sentence location on their F0 patterns or on the differences between the highest and lowest values. 2) There was no relationship between peak-F0 values and the F0 values of filled-pause onsets, but the F0 values of filled-pause onsets and the F0-values of non-marked breath-group onsets were highly similar. The F0 values of filled-pause onsets seem to be stable within the same speaker’s speech. They are speaker-dependent and strongly linked to the physiological, absolute aspects of speech production. It is assumed that filled-pause onset may be used by listeners as a reference for evaluating the speaker’s pitch range.