UNLABELLED The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between articulation rate, frequency and duration of disfluencies of different types, and temperament in preschool children who stutter (CWS). In spontaneous speech samples from 19 CWS (mean age=3:9; years:months), we measured articulation rate, the frequency and duration of (a) sound prolongations; (b) sound-syllable repetiti...

Many factors are thought to increase the chances of misrecognizing a word in ASR, including low frequency, nearby disfluencies, short duration, and being at the start of a turn. However, few of these factors have been formally examined. This paper analyzes a variety of lexical, prosodic, and disfluency factors to determine which are likely to increase ASR error rates. Findings include the follo...

In this paper, we compare the distribution of disfluencies in two human–computer dialogue corpora. One corpus consists of unimodal travel booking dialogues, which were recorded over the telephone. In this unimodal system, all components except the speech recognition were authentic. The other corpus was collected using a semi-simulated multi-modal dialogue system with an animated talking agent a...

Syntactic parsing of speech transcriptions faces the problem of the presence of disfluencies that break the syntactic structure of the utterances. We propose in this paper two solutions to this problem. The first one relies on a disfluencies predictor that detects disfluencies and removes them prior to parsing. The second one integrates the disfluencies in the syntactic structure of the utteran...

During public presentations or interviews, speakers commonly and unconsciously abuse interjections or filled pauses that interfere with speech fluency and negatively affect listeners impression and speech perception. Types of disfluencies and methods of detection are reviewed. Authors carried out a survey which results indicated the most adverse elements for audience. The article presents an ap...

PURPOSE This study was designed to (a) compare the speech fluency of school-age children who do and do not stutter (CWS and CWNS, respectively) within 2 standard diagnostic speaking contexts (conversation and narration) while also controlling for speaking topic, and (b) examine the extent to which children's performance on such discourse tasks is affected by age. METHOD Participants were 44 s...

With the increasing number of applications handling spontaneous speech, the needs to process spoken languages become stronger. Speech disfluency is one of the most challenging tasks to deal with in automatic speech processing. As most applications are trained with well-formed, written texts, many issues arise when processing spontaneous speech due to its distinctive characteristics. Therefore, ...

The purpose of this study was to account for the frequency, type, and possible origins of speech disfluency clusters in the spontaneous speech of 3- to 6-year-old children, 30 who stutter and 30 who do not stutter. On the basis of the Covert Repair Hypothesis (Postma & Kolk, 1993), which suggests that stutterings are the by-products of self-repairs or self-corrections of speech errors, three hy...

Complex disfluencies that involve the repetition or correction of words are frequent in conversational speech, with repetition disfluencies alone accounting for over 20% of disfluencies. These disfluencies generally do not lead to comprehension errors for human listeners. We propose that the frequent occurrence of parallel prosodic features in the reparandum (REP) and alteration (ALT) intervals...

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...