Repetition disfluencies are among the most frequent type of disfluency in conversational speech, accounting for over 20% of disfluencies, yet they do not generally lead to comprehension errors for human listeners. We propose that parallel prosodic features in the REP and ALT intervals of the repetition disfluency provide strong perceptual cues that signal the repetition to the listener. We repo...

PURPOSE To compare the occurrence of speech disfluencies during narrative production in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their age-matched peers. METHODS The study included 60 children aged between 7 and 10 years, 40 with typical language development and 20 with SLI. For data collection, a series of 15 stories was used, each one represented by pictures composed of four sce...

Although disfluencies such as uh are generally not treated as linguistic items, our results suggest that they can affect syntactic parsing. Using a grammaticality judgment task, we demonstrate that disfluencies are able to affect the syntactic parse of a sentence in two ways. First, disfluencies can make syntactic reanalysis more difficult by coming between an ambiguous constituent and a disamb...

Disfluencies (“um,” repeats, self-repairs) are prevalent in spontaneous speech, and are relevant to both human speech communication and speech processing by machine. Although disfluencies have commonly been viewed as ‘noisy’ events, results from a large descriptive study indicate that disfluencies show regularities in a number of dimensions [9]. This paper reports selected results on Switchboar...

Despite traditional evidence that lexically-stressed content words are the most common loci of disfluencies in stuttered speech (Natke, et al., 2002; Prins, et al., 1991; Brown 1938), the fact that certain function words—crucially, those directly preceding stressed content words—are also disfluently produced (Au-Yeung, et al., 1998; Howell & Sackin, 2000), suggests that the actual trigger of a ...

Theoretical models of speech production have hypothesized a relation between different types of disfluencies and the mechanisms responsible for them. Some disfluencies, such as filled pauses (e.g. ‘um’, ‘uh’) and repetitions (i.e. ‘the the’), are argued to arise from difficulty in planning, while cutoff disfluencies (e.g. ‘horiz-[ontal]’) are argued to arise from selfmonitoring. This distinctio...

This paper presents a study of disfluencies in written language production. Texts from ten university students are compared to data from people who almost never use writing, namely adult dyslexics and to texts from people who communicate in writing under real-time constraints every day, namely deaf whose main use of writing is text telephone conversations. This paper investigates which types of...

Unrehearsed spoken language often contains disfluencies. In order to correctly interpret a spoken utterance, any such disfluencies must be identified and removed or otherwise dealt with. Operating on transcripts of speech which contain disfluencies, our particular focus here is the identification and correction of speech repairs using a noisy channel model. Our aim is to develop a high-accuracy...

In previous work, we presented an annotation scheme that can describe complex disfluencies. In this paper, we first show the prevalence of complex disfluencies and illustrate the types of distinctions that our scheme allows. Second, we present an annotation tool that allows the scheme to be easily applied. Third, we present the results of a reliability study in annotating complex disfluencies w...