R J Lickley | PubMed Health

PubMed1993

Intonation of clause-internal filled pauses.

Clause-internal filled pauses and preceding peak fundamental frequency (F0) values were analyzed to determine whether the intonation of filled pauses is relative to, or independent of, prior prosodic context. Higher peaks were found to be systematically associated with higher filled-pause values, supporting the 'relative' hypothesis. A linear model, in which filled-pause F0 was expressed as an invariant (over speakers) proportion of the distance between preceding peak F0 and a speaker-dependent baseline F0, produced results nearly identical to those of a two-parameter model in which the coefficients of peak and baseline were allowed to vary freely. The model was less appropriate for filled pauses after sentence-initial peaks, but unaffected by temporal variables.

Female↗

PubMedDate not supplied

When can listeners detect disfluency in spontaneous speech?

Three experiments investigated listeners' ability to detect disfluency in spontaneous speech. All employed gated word recognition with judgments of disfluency for spontaneous utterances containing disfluencies and for three kinds of fluent control utterances from the same six speakers: repetitions of corrected recordings of original disfluent items, spontaneous fluent utterances loosely matched in structure to the disfluent items, and repetitions of those spontaneous fluent items. In Experiment 1, 120 stimuli were word-level gated and presented to 20 subjects for word identification and for judgments on whether the utterance was about to become disfluent. Listeners were unable to predict disfluency reliably. New subjects (N = 20, 43) judged whether the same utterances had already become disfluent at each word gate in Experiment 2 or at each 35 ms gate in Experiment 3. Subjects reliably detected existing disfluencies during the first word gate after the interruption and before they recognized the word. Though more common around disfluencies than at similar points in controls, failures of word identification were not reliably associated with detection. Results are discussed in the light of computational models of disfluency detection.

Adult↗