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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Levelt, W.: Speaking. MIT Press, Cambridge (1989)
Allwood, J., Nivre, J., Ahlsén, E.: Sppech management - on the non-written life of speech. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 13 (1990)
Swerts, M.: Filled pauses as markers of discourse structure. Journal of Pragmatics 30, 485–496 (1998)
Clark, H., Fox Tree, J.: Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition 84 (2002)
Nakatani, C., Hirschberg, J.: A corpus-based study of repair cues in spontaneous speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) 95, 1603–1616 (1994)
Shriberg, E.: Preliminaries to a Theory of Speech Disfluencies. PhD thesis, University of California (1994)
Liu, Y., Shriberg, E., Stolcke, A., Hillard, D., Ostendorf, M., Harper, M.: Enriching speech recognition with automatic detection of sentence boundaries and disfluencies. IEEE Transaction on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing 14, 1526–1540 (2006)
Adell, J., Bonafonte, A., Escudero-Mancebo, D.: On the generation of synthetic disfluent speech: local prosodic modifications caused by the insertion of editing terms. In: Proc. Interspeech 2008, Brisbane, Australia (September 2008)
Tomokiyo, L., Peterson, K., Black, A., Lenzo, K.: Intelligibility of machine translation output in speech synthesis. In: Proc. Interspeech 2006, Pittsburgh, USA (September 2006)
Esposito, A., Marinaro, M.: What pauses can tell us about speech and gesture partnership. In: Esposito, A., Bratanic, M., Keller, E., Marinaro, M. (eds.) Fundamentals of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and the Biometric Issue, pp. 45–57. IOS Press, Amsterdam (2007)
Benus, S., Enos, F., Hirschberg, J., Shriberg, E.: Pauses in deceptive speech. In: Speech Prosody Conference (2006)
O’Connell, D., Kowal, S.: Communicating with one another - towards a psychology of spontaneous spoken discourse. Springer, New York (2008)
Arnold, J., Fagnano, M., Tanenhaus, M.: Disfluencies signal theee, um, new information. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 32 (2003)
Rose, R.: The communicative value of filled pauses in spontaneous speech. PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, UK (1998)
Heike, A.: A content-processing view of hesitation phenomena. Language and Speech 24 (1981)
O’Connell, D., Kowal, S.: Uh and um revisited: are they interjections for signaling delay? Psycholinguistic Research 34 (2005)
Eklund, R., Shriberg, E.: Crosslinguistic disfluency modeling: a comparative analysis of swedish and american english human-human and human-machine dialogs. In: International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Sydney, Australia (1998)
Vasilescu, I., Adda-decker, M.: A cross-language study of acoustic and prosodic characteristics of vocalic hesitations. In: Esposito, A., Bratanic, M., Keller, E., Marinaro, M. (eds.) Fundamentals of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and the Biometric Issue, pp. 140–148. IOS Press, Amsterdam (2007)
Koponen, M., Riggenbach, H.: Perspectives on Fluency. University of Michigan Press, Michigan (2000)
Fillmore, C.J.: On fluency. In: Kempler, D., Wang, W. (eds.) Individual Differences in Language Ability and Language Behavior, pp. 85–102. Academic Press, London (1979)
Lennon, P.: The lexical element in spoken second language fluency. In: Koponen, M., Riggenbach, H. (eds.) Perspectives on Fluency, pp. 25–42. University of Michigan Press (2000)
Wennerstrom, A.: The role of intonation in second language fluency. In: Koponen, M., Riggenbach, H. (eds.) Perspectives on Fluency, pp. 102–127. University of Michigan Press (2000)
Freitas, M.J.: Estratégias de organização temporal do discurso. Master’s thesis, University of Lisbon (1990)
Moniz, H.: Contributo para a caracterização dos mecanismos de (dis)fluência no Português Europeu. Master’s thesis, University of Lisbon (2006)
Moniz, H., Mata, A.I., Viana, M.C.: On filled pauses and prolongations in European Portuguese. In: Proc. Interspeech 2007, Antwerp, Belgium (September 2007)
Moniz, H., Mata, A.I., Viana, M.C.: Mecanismos de (dis)fluência em contexto escolar. In: Frota, S., Santos, A.L. (eds.) XXIII Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Línguística, pp. 329–343. Associação Portuguesa de Linguística (2008)
Falé, I.: Fragmento da prosódia do português europeu: as estruturas coordenadas. Master’s thesis, University of Lisbon (1995)
Mata, A.I.: Para o Estudo da Entoação em Fala Espontânea e Preparada no Português Europeu. PhD thesis, University of Lisbon (1999)
Frota, S.: Prosody and Focus in European Portuguese. In: Phonological Phrasing and Intonation. Garland Publishing, New York (2000)
Viana, M.C.: Para a Síntese da Entoação do Português. PhD thesis, University of Lisbon (1987)
Vigário, M.: The prosodic word in European Portuguese. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin (2003)
Viana, M.C., Frota, S., Falé, I., Mascarenhas, I., Mata, A.I., Moniz, H., Vigário, M.: Towards a p_tobi. In: Unpublished Workshop of the Transcription of Intonation in the Ibero-Romance Languages, PaPI 2007 (2007), http://www2.ilch.uminho.pt/eventos/PaPI2007/Extended-Abstract-P-ToBI.PDF
Frota, S.: The intonotional phonology of european portuguese. In: Sun-uh (ed.) Prosodic Typology II. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2009)
Silverman, K., Beckman, M., Pitrelli, J., Ostendorf, M., Wightman, C., Price, P., Pierrehumbert, J., Hirschberg, J.: Tobi: a standard for labeling english prosody. In: International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Banff, Canada (1992)
Stolcke, A., Shriberg, E., Bates, T., Ostendorf, M., Hakkani, D., Plauché, M., Tür, G., Lu, Y.: Automatic detection of sentence boundaries and disfluencies based on recognized words. In: International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, pp. 2247–2250 (1998)
Moniz, H., Mata, A.I., Trancoso, I., Viana, M.C.: How can we use disfluencies and still sound as a good speaker? In: Proc. Interspeech 2008, Brisbane, Australia (September 2008)
Breiman, L., Friedman, J., Olshen, R., Stone, C.: Classification and Regression Trees. Wadsworth and Brooks, Pacific Grove (1984)
Trancoso, I., Martins, R., Moniz, H., Mata, A.I., Viana, M.C.: The lectra corpus - classroom lecture transcriptions in european portuguese. In: LREC 2008 - Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Marrakesh, Morocco (May 2008)
Eklund, R.: Disfluency in Swedish Human-Human and Human-Machine Travel Booking Dialogues. PhD thesis, University of Linkopink (2004)
Shriberg, E.: To “errrr” is human: ecology and acoustics of speech disfluencies. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 31, 153–169 (2001)
Fox Tree, J.: Pronouncing “the” as “thee” to signal problems in speaking. Cognition 62, 151–167 (1995)
Clark, H., Wasow, T.: Repeating words in spontaneous speech. Cognitive Psychology 37 (1998)
Boersma, P., Weenink, D.: Praat: doing phonetics by computer, version 5.1.20
Welby, P.: The slaying of Lady Mondegreen, being a study of French tonal association and alignment and their role in speech segmentation. PhD thesis, Ohio State University (2003)
O’Shaughnessy, D.: Recognition of hesitations in spontaneous speech. In: IEEE Conference on Acoustic, Speech, and Signal Processing, pp. 521–524 (1992)
Shriberg, E.: Phonetic consequences of speech disfluency. In: International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, San Francisco, pp. 612–622 (1999)
Mateus, M.H., d’Andrade, E.: The Phonology of Portuguese. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2000)
Shriberg, E.: A prosody-only decision-tree model for disfluency detection. In: Eurospeech 1997, Rhodes, Greece, pp. 2383–2387 (1997)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Moniz, H., Trancoso, I., Mata, A.I. (2010). Disfluencies and the Perspective of Prosodic Fluency. In: Esposito, A., Campbell, N., Vogel, C., Hussain, A., Nijholt, A. (eds) Development of Multimodal Interfaces: Active Listening and Synchrony. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5967. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12397-9_33
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12397-9_33
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-12396-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-12397-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)