This study investigated the relationship between the contextual probability of lexical items in spontaneous speech, as measured by the Cloze procedure, and word frequency. It also attempted to determine the relative importance of the two variables in causing delay, in the form of hesitation, in the production of spontaneous speech. The analysis revealed that content words of low contextual prob...

There is a growing consensus that there is a need to evaluate second language speech performance with respect to first language speech behavior. To support this need, the Crosslinguistic Corpus of Hesitation Phenomena was developed. This freely available corpus is designed to investigate the crosslinguistic influence of speech patterns and consists of recordings of speakers producing first and ...

This paper presents the results of a perception experiment designed to investigate the contribution of a pre-focal hesitation pause, delayed focal peak and a raised F0 range for signaling interrogative mode in Swedish. The results are consistent with a previous study which demonstrated that a delayed peak combined with a raised F0 range can effectively signal interrogative mode in Swedish echo ...

In this paper, we present the experimental design for the evaluation of the impact of social signal application on a user’s decision making in the area of telecommunications. The aim of the design is to show that user’s social signals are applicable feedbacks in conversational recommender systems. We use user satisfaction (with the system and content) evaluation criteria. During social interact...

Immunizations have led to a significant decrease in rates of vaccine-preventable diseases and have made a significant impact on the health of children. However, some parents express concerns about vaccine safety and the necessity of vaccines. The concerns of parents range from hesitancy about some immunizations to refusal of all vaccines. This clinical report provides information about addressi...

Understanding the heterogeneity of groups along the vaccine hesitancy continuum presents an opportunity to tailor and increase the impact of public engagement efforts with these groups. Audience segmentation can support these goals, as demonstrated here in the context of the 2009 H1N1 vaccine. In March 2010, we surveyed 1569 respondents, drawn from a nationally representative sample of American...

An effective approach to the study of prosody in spoken language seeks to identify prosodic patterns and their communicative values, and to subsequently find a correlation between these prosodic patterns and other layers of linguistic structure. The present research strives to define a single prosodic boundary pattern: the boundary tone of hesitation disfluencies in spontaneous Israeli Hebrew. ...

The paper presents a valued extension of the recently introduced concept of PQI interval order. The main idea is that, while comparing objects represented by interval of values there is a zone of hesitation between strict difference and strict similarity which could be modelled through valued relations. The paper presents suitable definitions of such valued relations fulfilling a number of inte...

In this study, we investigate cross-linguistic patterns in the alternation between UM, a hesitation marker consisting of a neutral vowel followed by a final labial nasal, and UH, a hesitation marker consisting of a neutral vowel in an open syllable. Based on a quantitative analysis of a range of spoken and written corpora, we identify clear and consistent patterns of change in the use of these ...

This paper deals with the functions of the French vocalic hesitation euh in interactive speech of man-machine question answering dialogs. The present analysis suggests that the vocalic hesitation euh may carry various properties in speech, both disfluent signaling the speakers’ efforts to put the intended message under production into appropriate words, and fluent, as markers of discourse struc...