The prosodic features of filled pauses (fillers) and self-repair are investigated with a view towards the detection of disfluencies. First, we compare the prosodic features of typical fillers and their fluent homonyms using read sentences of identical phoneme sequences. It is confirmed that the fillers (1) have at least 2 times longer duration than their non-disfluent counterparts, (2) tend to be followed by definitely longer pauses, and (3) have much smaller movement in their pitch contours. Then, the spontaneous fillers segmented out from a dialogue corpus are also analyzed. The same tendency is confirmed, but some samples lie halfway between the read fillers and their fluent homonyms. The abruptly cut-off endings in the self-repair are also analyzed by comparing with the ordinary endings of words. It is found that a short phoneme ending coupled with a relatively short succeeding pause indicates the abrupt cutoff.
Cite as: Quimbo, F.C.M., Kawahara, T., Doshita, S. (1998) Prosodic analysis of fillers and self-repair in Japanese speech. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 0762, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-826
@inproceedings{quimbo98_icslp,
author={Felix C. M. Quimbo and Tatsuya Kawahara and Shuji Doshita},
title={{Prosodic analysis of fillers and self-repair in Japanese speech}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 0762},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-826}
}