This paper discriminates different types of structural metadata in transcripts of university lectures: boundary events (comma, full stops and interrogatives), and disfluencies (repair). The disambiguation process is based on predefined multilayered linguistic information and on its hierarchical structure. Since boundary events may share similar linguistic properties, in terms of f0 and energy s...

Speech disfluencies (filled pauses, repetitions, repairs, and false starts) are pervasive in spontaneous speech. The ability to detect and correct disfluencies automatically is important for effective natural language understanding, as well as to improve speech models in general. Previous approaches to disfluency detection have relied heavily on lexical information, which makes them less applic...

A new database consisting of 227 dialogues in Spanish was annotated with disfluencies. Then a detailed analysis of the annotations was carried out. The database had been recorded according to the well known Wizard of Oz paradigm. Seventy-five speakers were given each one three different scenarios to make queries about timetables, prices and other conditions of train travels between two spanish ...

Research on spoken language comprehension has challenged the traditional view that disfluencies are mere performance errors that disrupt comprehension. By now, there is a range of evidence that disfluencies often facilitate language comprehension by supporting predictive inferences about upcoming speech. What is less well-understood is the exact nature of this benefit. How do listeners derive m...

Deficits in social communication, particularly pragmatic language, are characteristic of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Speech disfluencies may serve pragmatic functions such as cueing speaking problems. Previous studies have found that speakers with ASD differ from typically developing (TD) speakers in the types and patterns of disfluencies they produce, but fail to provide s...

Ordinary speech contains disfluencies in the form of hesitations and repairs. When listeners make global judgements on speech fluency they are influenced by the frequency and nature of the individual disfluencies contained in the speech. The aim of this study was to investigate a single dimension, pause duration, in the perception of speech fluency. The method involved simulation of pause durat...

Disfluencies include editing terms such as uh and um as well as repeats and revisions. Little is known about how disfluencies are processed, and there has been next to no research focused on the way that disfluencies affect structure-building operations during comprehension. We review major findings from both computational linguistics and psycholinguistics, and then we summarize the results of ...

Disfluencies, when present in speech signal, can make syntactic parsing difficult. This difficulty is increased when machines are involved in communication and when speech devices rely on automatic speech recognition techniques. In order to improve automatic speech parsing and thus speech comprehension, methods have been proposed to filter disfluencies out from the speech signal. Attempts have ...

PURPOSE This study experimentally investigated behavioral correlates of emotional reactivity and emotion regulation and their relation to speech (dis)fluency in preschool-age children who do (CWS) and do not (CWNS) stutter during emotion-eliciting conditions. METHOD Participants (18 CWS, 14 boys; 18 CWNS, 14 boys) completed two experimental tasks (1) a neutral ("apples and leaves in a transpa...