ETRW on Dialogue and Prosody September 1-3, 1999 Veldhoven, The Netherlands

Speaking in Time

Herbert H. Clark

Stanford University, CA, USA

Most disfluencies, I argue, are not truly mistakes. Rather, speakers design them as signals for coordinating with their addressees on certain of their speech actions. At the lowest level, speakers try to synchronize their vocalizations with their addressees’ attention. At the next level up, they try to synchronize, or pace, the presentation of each expression with their addressees’ analysis of those expressions. Speakers have a variety of strategies for achieving synchronization, and many of these lead to the common forms of disfluencies.

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Bibliographic reference.  Clark, Herbert H. (1999): "Speaking in time", In DIAPRO-1999, 1-6.