Background: the speech fluency pattern attributed to individuals with Williams-Beuren syndrome (WBS) is supported by the effectiveness of the phonological loop. Some studies have reported the occurrence of speech disruptions caused by lexical and semantic deficits. However, the type and frequency of such speech disruptions has not been well elucidated. Aim: to determine the speech fluency profi...

Speakers are often disfluent, for example, saying "theee uh candle" instead of "the candle." Production data show that disfluencies occur more often during references to things that are discourse-new, rather than given. An eyetracking experiment shows that this correlation between disfluency and discourse status affects speech comprehensions. Subjects viewed scenes containing four objects, incl...

This paper tests the hypothesis that listeners miss dis uencies or fail to transcribe them accurately because dis uencies interfere with the normal relationship between speech sound and linguistic context in human spoken word recognition. In a word-level gating experiment 16 listeners heard a total of 56 dis uent utterances selected from a corpus of spontaneous speech, 56 length-matched uent co...

We present a corpus-based approach for using intonation and duration to detect disfluency sites. The questions we aim to answer are: What are the prosodic cues for each disfluency type? Can predictive models be built to describe the relationship between disfluency types and prosodic cues? Are there correlations between the reparandum onset and offset and the repair onset and offset? Is there a ...

Imagine a speaker who says "Turn left, uh I mean…" Before hearing the repair, the listener is likely to anticipate the word "right" based on the context, including the reparandum "left." Thus, even though the reparandum is not intended as part of the utterance, the listener uses it as information to predict the repair. The issue we explore in this article is how prediction operates in disfluenc...

Speech disfluencies (such as filled pauses, repetitions, restarts) are among the characteristics distinguishing spontaneous speech from planned or read speech. We introduce a language model that predicts disfluencies probabilistically and uses an edited,fluent context to predict following words. The model is based on a generalization of the standard N-gram language model. It uses dynamic progra...

This presentation reviews work on types of disfluency in the spontaneous speech of fluent speakers and speakers who stutter. Examination is made of factors that determine where disfluencies are located. It is concluded that the phonological, or prosodic, word provides a good basis for explaining the distribution of different types of disfluency in spontaneous speech.

We present work on a three-stage system to detect and classify disfluencies in multi party dialogues. The system consists of a regular expression based module and two machine learning based modules. The results are compared to other work on multi party dialogues and we show that our system outperforms previously reported ones.

References included in multi-document summaries are often problematic. In this paper, we present a corpus study performed to derive statistical models for the syntactic realization of referential expressions. Our work shows how the syntactic realization of entities can influence the coherence of the text and provides a model for rewriting references in multidocument summaries to smooth disfluen...