The first contribution of this study is the description of the prosodic behavior of discourse markers present in two speech corpora of European Portuguese (EP) in different domains (university lectures, and map-task dialogues). The second contribution is a multiclass classification to verify, given their prosodic features, which words in both corpora are classified as discourse markers, which a...

Our overarching research project explores the usability of disfluencies in incremental spoken dialogue systems. This endeavor requires basic phonetic research on disfluencies in spontaneous speech corpora as to define strategies for synthesizing disfluencies in a meaningful way. In this paper, our current research focus lies in an investigation of disfluency-related lengthening as a promising t...

Speech disfluencies can convey information to listeners: Adults and children predict that filled pauses (e.g., uhh) will be followed by referents that are difficult to describe or are new to the discourse. In adults, this is driven partly by an understanding that disfluencies reflect processing difficulties. This experiment examined whether 3½-year-olds' use of disfluencies similarly involves i...

The ability to infer the referential intentions of speakers is a crucial part of learning a language. Previous research has uncovered various contextual and social cues that children may use to do this. Here we provide the first evidence that children also use speech disfluencies to infer speaker intention. Disfluencies (e.g. filled pauses 'uh' and 'um') occur in predictable locations, such as ...

Spoken language contains disfluencies, which include editing terms such as uh and um as well as repeats and corrections. In less than ten years the question of how disfluencies are handled by the human sentence comprehension system has gone from virtually ignored to a topic of major interest in computational linguistics and psycholinguistics. We discuss relevant empirical findings and describe ...

Disfluency in Swedish human–human and human–machine travel booking dialogues Abstract This thesis studies disfluency in spontaneous Swedish speech, i.e., the occurrence of hesitation phenomena like eh, öh, truncated words, repetitions and repairs, mispronunciations, truncated words and so on. The thesis is divided into three parts: PART I provides the background, both concerning scientific, per...

Information about the state and planning of the speaker is obscured in traditional classifications of disfluencies which are generally at the word level. This study delves into the acoustic and prosodic information of repetitions, one of the most common disfluencies. A hierarchical clustering of prosodic features reveals three subsets of repetitions, each reflecting different problems in planning.

Previous disfluency studies have argued that disfluencies are strategic signals to a listener in times of difficulty (Clark & Wasow, 1998). Other research suggests that disfluencies are a possible indication of cognitive overload (Bard et al., 2000). Bard et al. (2003) demonstrate that interaction with a Follower could induce more difficulties for a speaker. The current paper tests these hypoth...

In this paper, we present an annotation scheme for disfluencies. Unlike previous schemes, this scheme allows complex disfluencies with multiple backtracking points to be annotated, which are common in stuttered speech. The scheme specifies each disfluency in terms of word-level annotations, thus making the scheme useful for building sophisticated language models of disfluencies. As determining ...