Acoustic features of filled pauses in polish task-oriented dialogues

Abstract

Filled pauses (FPs) have proved to be more than valuable cues to speech production processes and important units in discourse analysis. Some aspects of their form and occurrence patterns have been shown to be speaker- and language-specific. In the present study, basic acoustic properties of FPs in Polish task-oriented dialogues are explored. A set of FPs was extracted from a corpus of twenty task-oriented dialogues on the basis of available annotations. After initial scrutiny and selection, a subset of the signals underwent a series of pitch, formant frequency and voice quality analyses. A significant amount of variation found in the realisations of FPs justifies their potential application in speaker recognition systems. Regular monosegmental FPs were confirmed to show relatively stable basic acoustic parameters, which allows for their easy identification and measurements but it may result in less significant differences among the speakers.