The effect of informational load on disfluencies in interpreting: a corpus-based regression analysis

This article attempts to measure the cognitive or informational load in interpreting by modelling the occurrence rate of the speech disfluency uh(m). In a corpus of 107 interpreted and 240 non-interpreted texts, informational load is operationalized in terms of four measures: delivery rate, lexical density, percentage of numerals, and average sentence length. The occurrence rate of the indicated speech disfluency was modelled using a rate model. Interpreted texts are analyzed based on the interpreter's output and compared with the input of non-interpreted texts, and measure the effect of source text features. The results demonstrate that interpreters produce significantly more uh(m) s than non-interpreters and that this difference is mainly due to the effect of lexical density on the output side. The main source predictor of uh(m) s in the target text was shown to be the delivery rate of the source text. On a more general level of significance, the second analysis also revealed an increasing effect of the numerals in the source texts and a decreasing effect of the numerals in the target texts

Position of Hesitation Marker in Everyday, Informal Conversation in English

Research on hesitation has revealed that hesitation markers are generally considered to be predominantly used in spontaneous speech. This study investigates and reports on the frequency and distribution of hesitation markers (specifically, filled pauses, small words, and repeats) in everyday conversation in English. The study examines the position of hesitation markers, looking at their distribution across utterances, produced by young adult speakers (of 15-25 years). Data were collected from everyday, informal conversation transcripts from Crystal & Davy (1975). The study attaches particular relevance to the naturalness of the dataset, in that it has not been elicited in any way. All 15 conversational extracts were examined to gain thorough insight into the distribution of hesitation markers across syntactic utterances, for general overall dominant patterns in natural conversation. In identifying the frequency of hesitation markers used in the initial, middle and final positions of the conversational utterances, it was discovered that participants most frequently use hesitation markers in the middle of general conversational utterances, followed by the initial and final positions, respectively

Speech and Prosody Characteristics of Adolescents and Adults With High-Functioning Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Speech and prosody-voice profiles for 15 male speakers with High-Functioning Autism (HFA) and 15 male speakers with Asperger syndrome (AS) were compared to one another and to profiles for 53 typically developing male speakers in the same 10- to 50-years age range. Compared to the typically developing speakers, significantly more participants in both the HFA and AS groups had residual articulation distortion errors, uncodable utterances due to discourse constraints, and utterances coded as inappropriate in the domains of phrasing, stress, and resonance. Speakers with AS were significantly more voluble than speakers with HFA, but otherwise there were few statistically significant differences between the two groups of speakers with pervasive developmental disorders. Discussion focuses on perceptual-motor and social sources of differences in the prosody-voice findings for individuals with Pervasive Developmental Disorders as compared with findings for typical speakers, including comment on the grammatical, pragmatic, and affective aspects of prosody

5IDER: Unified Query Rewriting for Steering, Intent Carryover, Disfluencies, Entity Carryover and Repair

Providing voice assistants the ability to navigate multi-turn conversations is a challenging problem. Handling multi-turn interactions requires the system to understand various conversational use-cases, such as steering, intent carryover, disfluencies, entity carryover, and repair. The complexity of this problem is compounded by the fact that these use-cases mix with each other, often appearing simultaneously in natural language. This work proposes a non-autoregressive query rewriting architecture that can handle not only the five aforementioned tasks, but also complex compositions of these use-cases. We show that our proposed model has competitive single task performance compared to the baseline approach, and even outperforms a fine-tuned T5 model in use-case compositions, despite being 15 times smaller in parameters and 25 times faster in latency.Comment: Interspeech 202

Processing of Garden-Path Sentences Containing Silent and Filled Pauses in Stuttered Speech: Evidence From a Comprehensive Study

Disfluency is common in spontaneous speech. Self-correction is a type of disfluency that consists of reparandum, filler, and repair (Levelt, 1989). Little is known about the processing of self-corrections in a normally disfluent speech, and even less is known about its processing in atypically disfluent speech (e.g. speech in patients with autism spectrum disorder, hearing impaired, patients with brain damage, and stuttered speech; see: Lake, Humphreys, & Cardy, 2011; Lind, Hickson, & Erber, 2004; Plexico et al., 2010; Rossi et al., 2011; Yairi, Gintautas, & Avent, 1981). This study focuses on self-correction disfluencies in garden-path sentences and employs a behavioral data collection method to investigate how disfluencies are processed as they are heard. This experiment examines spoken language comprehension by measuring accuracy and response time to comprehension questions. The data was gathered and analyzed. Two experimental conditions were presented where in the first one normal speakers listened to typically disfluent speech, and in the second one normal speakers listened to atypically disfluent stuttered speech. The information about the speakers in the recorded stimuli was kept from the listeners. Fillers, such as uh and um are common in stuttered speech because of their helpful role in starting an utterance. In stuttered speech, the uhs, ums and pauses tend to be longer and in odd places, relative to the speech of people who do not stutter. Therefore, the hypothesis of this study was that the fillers and pauses made by people who stutter affect the dynamics of processing, particularly in garden-path sentences. Namely, the accuracy rate for the comprehensive questions was predicted to be lower for the garden-path filled pause sentences, particularly for atypical speaker condition. Reaction time was predicted to be longer for the same condition. The analysis revealed an accuracy measure dependence on the speaker condition but no significant time correlation. This study provides significant information about how normal speakers’ comprehension is affected by disfluency such as pauses in general, and how speech impairment, such as stuttering, affects the processing of filled and silent pause disfluecies

Chinese Text Presentations and Reading Efficiency

Unlike alphabetic languages, Chinese text marks no word demarcation. Previous research inserted word-demarcating spaces into Chinese text but found inconsistent effects on reading efficiency. To address the potential trade-off effects of the additional length caused by inserted spaces, this study introduces color-and-font formatting as a word demarcation. A total of 41 first-language (L1) and English-speaking second-language (L2) Chinese speakers read Chinese text presented in conventional, interword spaced, nonword spaced, interword formatted, and nonword formatted conditions. Participants further answered comprehension questions and shared retrospective perceptions. The results suggest altered text presentations can facilitate reading for L2 Chinese learners in accordance with proficiency levels and learning objectives. Interword spaced text facilitated reading speed, especially for higher-level Chinese learners. Interword formatted text facilitated accuracy for all L2 Chinese learners. Nonword formatted text facilitated accuracy for lower-level Chinese learners. In addition, altered text presentations were generally acknowledged and welcomed by L2 Chinese learners

Individual differences in the production of disfluency: a latent variable analysis of memory ability and verbal intelligence

Recent work has begun to focus on the role that individual differences in executive function and intelligence have on the production of fluent speech. However, isolating the underlying causes of different types of disfluency has been difficult given the speed and complexity of language production. In this study, we focused on the role of memory abilities and verbal intelligence, and we chose a task that relied heavily on memory for successful performance. Given the task demands, we hypothesised that a substantial proportion of disfluencies would be due to memory retrieval problems. We contrasted memory abilities with individual differences in verbal intelligence as previous work highlighted verbal intelligence as an important factor in disfluency production. A total of 78 participants memorised and repeated 40 syntactically complex sentences, which were recorded and coded for disfluencies. Model comparisons were carried out using hierarchical structural equation modelling. Results showed that repetitions were significantly related to verbal intelligence. Unfilled pauses and repairs, in contrast, were marginally (p <.09) related to memory abilities. The relationship in all cases was negative. Conclusions explore the link between different types of disfluency and particular problems arising in the course of production, and how individual differences inform theoretical debates in language production

Prosodic Annotation in a Thai Text-to-speech System

PACLIC 21 / Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea / November 1-3, 200