It is often assumed that a main function of gestures is to compensate for expressive difficulties. This predicts that gestures should mainly occur with disfluent speech. However, surprisingly little is known about the relationship between gestures and fluent vs. disfluent speech. This study investigates the putative compensatory role of gesture by examining competent speakers’ and language lear...

Disfluency is a common occurrence in speech, and generally thought to be related to difficulty in the production system. One unexplored issue is the extent to which inhibition is required to prevent incorrect speech plans from being articulated. Therefore, we examined disfluency production in participants with AttentionDeficit/Hyper-Activity Disorder (ADHD), which is linked to deficits in inhib...

This article details the results of analyses we conducted on the discourse of schizophrenic patients, at the oral production (disfluences) and lexical (part-of-speech and lemmas) levels. This study is part of a larger project, which includes other levels of analyses (syntax and discourse). The obtained results should help us rebut or identify new linguistic evidence participating in the manifes...

We investigate grammatical error detection in spoken language, and present a data-driven method to train a dependency parser to automatically identify and label grammatical errors. This method is agnostic to the label set used, and the only manual annotations needed for training are grammatical error labels. We find that the proposed system is robust to disfluencies, so that a separate stage to...

The focus of this paper is artificial voices with different personalities. Previous studies have shown links between an individual’s use of disfluencies in their speech and their perceived personality. Here, filled pauses (uh and um) and discourse markers (like, you know, I mean) have been included in synthetic speech as a way of creating an artificial voice with different personalities. We dis...

Background: the use of a technological resource in fluency promotion. Aim: to verify the effectiveness of a stuttering treatment based on the use of surface electromyography (SEMG) exclusively. Method: participants were four stuttering adults of both genders. Assessment, pre and post-treatment, consisted of a speech gathering session and the analyses of the rest tension and of the reaction time...

This work explores prosodic cues of disfluent phenomena. In our previous work, we conducted a perceptual experiment regarding (dis)fluency ratings. Results suggested that some disfluencies may be considered felicitous by listeners, namely filled pauses and prolongations. In an attempt to discriminate which linguistic features are more salient in the classification of disfluencies as either flue...

In automatic speech recognition, a stochastic language model (LM) predicts the probability of the next word on the basis of previously recognized words. For the recognition of dictated speech this method works reasonably well since sentences are typically well-formed and reliable estimation of the probabilities is possible on the basis of large amounts of written text material. However, for spo...

Translating meetings presents a challenge since multispeaker speech shows a variety of disfluencies. In this paper we investigate the importance of transforming speech into well-written input prior to translating multi-party meetings. We first analyze the characteristics of this data and establish oracle scores. Sentence segmentation and punctuation are performed using a language model, turn in...

We investigate lengthening in spontaneous speech with the aim in mind to use it as a time-management strategy in incremental spoken dialogue systems. lengthening is a common feature of speech, occurring regularly near the edges of intonation phrases. It behaves similar to disfluencies when it occurs in places remote from phrasal boundaries. Disfluencies have proven useful in incremental spoken ...