Speakers strive to minimize inter-turn gaps when engaged in a dialogue. However, little work has addressed what impact this might have on the fluency of the following speech. In this paper we explore whether there are interactions between turn-taking gaps and turn-initial disfluencies and if the social pressure to respond to questions plays a role in that interaction. Our results indicate that ...

1 INESC-ID, 2 FLUL & 3 IST This paper describes our efforts towards the analysis of the prosodic properties (pitch, energy, and duration) of disfluencies, aiming both at a view of their global properties, and also at an analysis of their idiosyncratic behaviors. Underlying this task is the fact that disfluencies, e.g., filled pauses, prolongations, repetitions, substitutions, deletions, inserti...

UNLABELLED This study compared the disfluencies of German-speaking preschool children who stutter (CWS, N = 24) with those produced by age- and sex-matched comparison children who do not stutter (CWNS, N = 24). In accordance with Yairi and Ambrose's [Yairi, E., & Ambrose, N. (1992). A longitudinal study of stuttering in children: A preliminary report. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 35,...

Incremental dialogue systems can produce fast responses and can interact in a human-like fashion. However, these systems occasionally produce erroneous material or run out of things to say. Humans in such situations use disfluencies to remedy their ongoing production and signal this to the listener. We devised a new model for inserting disfluencies into synthesis and evaluated this approach in ...

This paper studies disfluencies in authentic human–human dialogues in Swedish and Tok Pisin. It is found that while there are no major differences as to types or frequencies on a macro level, there are dissimilarities on a micro level, notably in the characteristics of how prolonged segments are realized. The paper also discusses the results in the light of reported disfluencies in English, Ger...

Looking for a better understanding of spontaneous speech-related phenomena and to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR), we present here a study on the relationship between the occurrence of overlapping speech segments and disfluencies (filled pauses, repetitions, revisions) in political interviews. First we present our data, and our overlap annotation scheme. We detail our choice of overl...

The question addressed by this paper is whether disfluency resembles Inter-Move Interval, a measure of reaction time in conversation, in displaying effects of the overall difficulty of conducting a coherent conversation. Five sources of difficulty are considered as potential causes of disfluency: planning and producing an utterance, comprehending the prior utterance, performing a communicative ...

Filled pause disfluencies (e.g., uh) elicit a disfluency bias in listeners: listeners predict that a speaker will name an unfamiliar object, versus a familiar one, when both are equally plausible referents. When listeners receive speaker-specific information indicating that disfluency is not reliably tied to word familiarity, the disfluency bias can be suspended. The first aim of this study was...