The Distribution Of Disfluencies In Spontaneous Speech: Empirical Observations And Theoretical Implications

This dissertation provides an empirical description of the forms and their distribution of disfluencies in spontaneous speech. Although research in this area has received much attention in past four decades, large scale analyses of speech corpora from multiple communication settings, languages, and speaker\u27s cognitive states are still lacking. Understandings of regularities of different kinds of disfluencies based on large speech samples across multiple domains are essential for both theoretical and applied purposes. As an attempt to fill this gap, this dissertation takes the approach of quantitative analysis of large corpora of spontaneous speech. The selected corpora reflect a diverse range of tasks and languages. The dissertation re-examines speech disfluency phenomena, including silent pauses, filled pauses (``um and ``uh ) and repetitions, and provides the empirical basis for future work in both theoretical and applied settings. Results from the study of silent and filled pauses indicate that a potential sociolinguistic variation can in fact be explained from the perspective of the speech planning process. The descriptive analysis of repetitions has identified a new form of repetitive phenomenon: repetitive interpolation. Both the acoustic and textual properties of repetitive interpolation have been documented through rigorous quantitative analysis. The defining features of this phenomenon can be further used in designing speech based applications such as speaker state detection. Although the goal of this descriptive analysis is not to formulate and test specific hypothesis about speech production, potential directions for future research in speech production models are proposed and evaluated. The quantitative methods employed throughout this dissertation can also be further developed into interpretable features in machine learning systems that require automatic processing of spontaneous speech

The Distribution Of Disfluencies In Spontaneous Speech: Empirical Observations And Theoretical Implications

This dissertation provides an empirical description of the forms and their distribution of disfluencies in spontaneous speech. Although research in this area has received much attention in past four decades, large scale analyses of speech corpora from multiple communication settings, languages, and speaker\u27s cognitive states are still lacking. Understandings of regularities of different kinds of disfluencies based on large speech samples across multiple domains are essential for both theoretical and applied purposes. As an attempt to fill this gap, this dissertation takes the approach of quantitative analysis of large corpora of spontaneous speech. The selected corpora reflect a diverse range of tasks and languages. The dissertation re-examines speech disfluency phenomena, including silent pauses, filled pauses (``um and ``uh ) and repetitions, and provides the empirical basis for future work in both theoretical and applied settings. Results from the study of silent and filled pauses indicate that a potential sociolinguistic variation can in fact be explained from the perspective of the speech planning process. The descriptive analysis of repetitions has identified a new form of repetitive phenomenon: repetitive interpolation. Both the acoustic and textual properties of repetitive interpolation have been documented through rigorous quantitative analysis. The defining features of this phenomenon can be further used in designing speech based applications such as speaker state detection. Although the goal of this descriptive analysis is not to formulate and test specific hypothesis about speech production, potential directions for future research in speech production models are proposed and evaluated. The quantitative methods employed throughout this dissertation can also be further developed into interpretable features in machine learning systems that require automatic processing of spontaneous speech

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking such as its timing are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages -- with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals -- do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This research topic welcomes contributions from right across the board, for example from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialogue and conversation analysis, linguists interested in the use of language, phoneticians, corpus analysts and comparative ethologists or psychologists. We welcome contributions of all sorts, for example original research papers, opinion pieces, and reviews of work in subfields that may not be fully understood in other subfields