Disfluencies and the perspective of prosodic fluency

Abstract

This work explores prosodic cues of disfluent phenomena. We have conducted a perceptual experiment to test if listeners would rate all disfluencies as disfluent events or if some of them would be rated as fluent devices in specific prosodic contexts. Results pointed out significant differences (p < 0.05) between judgments of fluency vs. disfluency. Distinct prosodic properties of these events were also significant (p < 0.05) in their characterization as fluent devices. In an attempt to discriminate which linguistic features are more salient in the classification of disfluencies, we have also used CART techniques on a corpus of 3.5 hours of spontaneous and prepared non-scripted speech. CART results pointed out 2 splits: break indices and contour shape. The first split indicates that disfluent events uttered at breaks 3 and 4 are considered felicitous. The second one indicates that these events must have plateau or ascending contours to be considered as such; otherwise they are strongly penalized. The results obtained show that there are regular trends in the production of disfluencies, namely, prosodic phrasing and contour shape. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.