Abstract Bilingual and monolingual children might have different styles of using multimodal language. This study investigates speech disfluency gesture production 5- 7-year-old Turkish (N = 61) Turkish–English bilingual 51). We examined monolinguals’ narratives bilinguals’ English narratives. Results indicated that bilinguals were more disfluent than monolinguals, particularly for silent filled...

Mathematical competence can be evaluated by analyzing pauses between strokes that occurring whilst an individual copies equations. These pauses provide a temporal signal that reflects the cognitive effort to process chunks. ‘Centre-click’ interaction with a mouse and response grid on a computer display is introduced as new technique for measuring the temporal chunk signal. Alternative pause mea...

Psycholinguistic studies dealing with Alzheimer's disease (AD) commonly consider verbal aspects of language. In this article, we investigated both verbal and non-verbal aspects of speech production in AD. We used pauses and hesitations as markers of planning difficulties and hypothesized that AD patients show different patterns in the process of discourse production. We compared the distributio...

This paper describes a novel method for automatically inserting filled pauses (e.g., UM) into fluent texts. Although filled pauses are known to serve a wide range of psychological and structural functions in conversational speech, they have not traditionally been modelled overtly by state-of-the-art speech synthesis systems. However, several recent systems have started to model disfluencies spe...

Speech disfluencies occur frequently in spontaneous speech but their source is unclear. Disfluencies can take several forms, most commonly as verbalized disfluencies such as “um”, “uh”, and “so”, as well as silent pauses. In the present exploratory study we examined the relationship between disfluencies as distinct entities, individual differences in working memory capacity, and linguistic mark...

This paper describes an experiment in which the different pausing strategies in discourse in Dutch were investigated. Spontaneous discourses were recorded from four male and four female native Dutch speakers. Silent and filled pauses were located in the speech signal, as well as lengthened words. These were subsequently related to different discourse structures, obtained independently from pros...

In second language input studies, speaking speed is regarded as one of the most influential factors in comprehension. However, research in this area has mainly been conducted on written texts read aloud. The present study investigated temporal variables, such as articulation rate and ratio and frequency of fillers and silent pauses, in three university lectures given in Japanese. It was found t...

The interaction between pauses and the retrieval of the desired lexemes in the process of word production involves controversies that are worth investigating. The hypothesis of the present research was that certain pauses might refer to specific operations in the mental lexicon predicting the phonetic output. The temporal analysis of word retrieval was carried out in a ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ elici...

The scope of service design calls for holistic design techniques that represent multiple service moments. One such technique is the service walkthrough that can be used to prototype and formatively evaluate services. A service walkthrough is an enactment of several consecutive service moments. This paper informs decisions about how to set up service walkthroughs by looking at two kinds of walkt...

Speech disfluencies have been studied as clues to human speech production mechanisms. Major constituents are assumed to be principal units of planning and disfluencies are claimed to occur when speakers have some trouble in planning such units. We tested two hypotheses about the probability of disfluencies by examining the ratios of filled pauses (fillers) at sentence and clause boundaries: 1) ...