Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS'01) August 29-31, 2001 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Interruption Glottalization in German Spontaneous Speech

Klaus J. Kohler, Benno Peters, and Thomas Wesener

Institute of Phonetics and Digital Speech Processing, University of Kiel, Germany

This paper analyzes the occurrence of phonetic interruption cues at points of syntactic irregularities (false starts and truncations) in a large annotated corpus of German dialogues and compares interruption glottalization with laryngealization in terminal low phrase-final prosodies. Glottalization (including glottal stop) predominantly marks word fragments, whereas non-verbal insertions, e.g. breathing, tend to be word-external interruption cues. Laryngealization (excluding glottal stop) predominantly signals terminal phrase boundaries in turn-final positions. Individual speakers differ a great deal as to the distribution of these phenomena.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Kohler, Klaus J. / Peters, Benno / Wesener, Thomas (2001): "Interruption glottalization in German spontaneous speech", In DISS'01, 45-48.