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

Prolongations: A Dark Horse in the Disfluency Stable

Robert Eklund

Telia Research AB and Linköping University, Sweden

This paper studies a specific type of disfluency, viz. segment prolongation (PR), i.e., the "stretching out" of speech sounds as a means of hesitation. It is shown that the occurrence of PRs varies as a function of phone type, position in the word, lexical factors and word class, and that PRs are subject to phonotactic constraints in Swedish. A comparison between Swedish and Tok Pisin suggests that there are languagespecific traits associated with PR production.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Eklund, Robert (2001): "Prolongations: A dark horse in the disfluency stable", In DISS'01, 5-8.