 |
DiSS-LPSS Joint Workshop 2010The 5th Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech
|
 |
|
DiSS-LPSS Joint Workshop 2010The 5th Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech
|
|
Research on spoken language comprehension has challenged the traditional view that
disfluencies are mere performance
errors that disrupt comprehension. By now, there is a range of evidence that disfluencies
often facilitate language
comprehension by supporting predictive inferences about upcoming speech. What is less
well-understood is the exact
nature of this benefit. How do listeners derive meaning from disfluency? To what extent
are the benefits of hearing a
disfluency dependent on potentially "signaled" elements, such as the fillers um and uh,
versus more symptomatic
elements, such as the length of a silent pause? Do disfluencies benefit comprehension
through low-level mechanisms
such as priming, or do they call upon more high-level inferences? How sensitive are
listeners to different possible
sources of disfluency?
In this talk, I will review results from a research program investigating
the nature and processing of utterance-initial
disfluencies during referential communication. In these studies, the form of a speaker's
disfluency was experimentally
manipulated to discern its impact on the listener. The results generally support the view
that the primary meaning of
disfluencies is metacommunicative [1]: a disfluency signals that the speaker is
experiencing trouble, and the form of the
disfluency provides information about the severity of the trouble. The impact of a
disfluency on listeners is to cause
them to attend to the speaker and to attempt to diagnose the cause of the trouble.
Moreover, listeners appear to do this
in a flexible and largely speaker-specific, rather than "egocentric", manner. This model
gives good coverage of the
phenomena, and suggests important avenues for future investigation.
Bibliographic reference. Barr, Dale (2010): "Disfluency as metacommunication", In DiSS-LPSS-2010, 2.