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

Discourse Effects on the Prosodic Properties of Repetitions in Human-Computer Interaction

Kerstin Fischer

University of Hamburg, Germany

Repetitions may occur in human-computer interaction for various reasons; in this paper the constraints on the use of repetitions and their prosodic realization in the communication with a (simulated) automatic speech processing system which is not functioning properly will be analysed. It will be shown that repeats may have certain phonetic and prosodic properties which the respective original utterances do not necessarily display; however, besides these local changes depending on the immediate sequential context, the use of linguistic strategies such as repetitions changes globally throughout the dialogue. Thus, both the occurrence of repeated utterances and their prosodic realization depend on the relationship to global properties of the discourse structure which is partially determined by changes in the speakers’ attitude towards the system.

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Bibliographic reference.  Fischer, Kerstin (1999): "Discourse effects on the prosodic properties of repetitions in human-computer interaction", In DIAPRO-1999, 123-128.