A Corpus-Based Analysis of Pauses in Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting of Chinese English Majors

This study aims to investigate pause characteristics and probe into the main reason for unnatural pauses in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting. The data were from the Parallel Corpus of Chinese EFL Learners-Spoken (PACCEL-S), which includes phonetic materials in the interpretation part of TEM-8. Forty interpreters were divided into four groups according to their scores and gender. Their recordings and transcribed texts were annotated and analyzed to provide a comprehensive overview of pausing. The findings are: (1) Pauses often occur in C-E CI. Interpreters use more UPs and unnatural pauses. (2) There is no interaction between proficiency and gender in pause duration and frequency, as well as the two indicators of unnatural pauses. (3) UP duration is affected by proficiency, and females tend to produce more FPs and unnatural pauses. (4) FP and UP invariably occur together but do not show linear correlation. (5) Interpreters tend to pause before content words, and unnatural pauses are mainly induced by notional word retrieval difficulty. By discussing pauses and explaining the leading motivation for unnatural pauses from the perspective of lexical retrieval, this study informs readers of the nature and features of pauses and provides suggestions for stakeholders

Continuous Interaction with a Virtual Human

Attentive Speaking and Active Listening require that a Virtual Human be capable of simultaneous perception/interpretation and production of communicative behavior. A Virtual Human should be able to signal its attitude and attention while it is listening to its interaction partner, and be able to attend to its interaction partner while it is speaking – and modify its communicative behavior on-the-fly based on what it perceives from its partner. This report presents the results of a four week summer project that was part of eNTERFACE’10. The project resulted in progress on several aspects of continuous interaction such as scheduling and interrupting multimodal behavior, automatic classification of listener responses, generation of response eliciting behavior, and models for appropriate reactions to listener responses. A pilot user study was conducted with ten participants. In addition, the project yielded a number of deliverables that are released for public access

The role and structure of pauses in Slovenian media speech

This article explores pauses in terms of the roles they play in speech and their structural composition. They are perceived as the indispensable acoustic and/or semantic break in the flow of speech and are considered an important marker and organizer of speech. The study, based on a corpus of selected Slovenian talk shows (i.e. authentic and relatively spontaneous media speech), showed that 1) on average cognitive or communicative pauses (not physiological ones) predominate among the speakers analyzed, 2) speakers most often interrupt their speech to look for the right formulation and to plan syntactic structures and the segmentation of the flow of speech, 3) on average, empty or silent pauses, which primarily but not exclusively perform the role of breathing, are the most common among the speakers analyzed, and 4) with all the speakers analyzed, drawn-out schwas (uh sounds) occur most often among filled and "silent-filled" pauses

Exploring Translation and Interpreting Hybrids. The Case of Sight Translation

This article reports on a comparative study of written translation and sight translation, drawing on experimental data combining keystroke logging, eye-tracking and quality ratings of spoken and written output produced by professional translators and interpreters. Major differences in output rate were observed when comparing oral and written modalities. Evaluation of the translation products showed that the lower output rate in the written condition was not justified by significantly higher quality in the written products. Observations from the combination of data sources point to fundamental behavioural differences between interpreters and translators. Overall, working in the oral modality seems to have a lot to offer in terms of saving time and effort without compromising the output quality, and there seems to be a case for increasing the role of oral translation in translator training, incorporating it as a deliberate practice activity.Le présent article fait état d’une étude comparative de la traduction écrite et de la traduction à vue. Elle est fondée sur des données expérimentales qui associent un enregistrement de la frappe, une étude oculométrique ainsi qu’une évaluation de la qualité de traductions orales et écrites produites par des traducteurs et des interprètes professionnels. La comparaison des modalités orale et écrite met en évidence des différences majeures. L’évaluation des traductions montre en effet que le débit faible observé pour la traduction écrite ne garantit nullement une qualité accrue. Par ailleurs, l’analyse comparative fait état de différences fondamentales de comportement entre interprètes et traducteurs. De façon générale, la traduction orale semble pouvoir contribuer de façon significative à l’économie de temps et d’effort sans compromettre la qualité, ce qui justifierait une accentuation de son rôle, et même une pleine intégration, dans la formation des traducteurs

The phonetics of speech breathing : pauses, physiology, acoustics, and perception

Speech is made up of a continuous stream of speech sounds that is interrupted by pauses and breathing. As phoneticians are primarily interested in describing the segments of the speech stream, pauses and breathing are often neglected in phonetic studies, even though they are vital for speech. The present work adds to a more detailed view of both pausing and speech breathing with a special focus on the latter and the resulting breath noises, investigating their acoustic, physiological, and perceptual aspects. We present an overview of how a selection of corpora annotate pauses and pause-internal particles, as well as a recording setup that can be used for further studies on speech breathing. For pauses, this work emphasized their optionality and variability under different tempos, as well as the temporal composition of silence and breath noise in breath pauses. For breath noises, we first focused on acoustic and physiological characteristics: We explored alignment between the onsets and offsets of audible breath noises with the start and end of expansion of both rib cage and abdomen. Further, we found similarities between speech breath noises and aspiration phases of /k/, as well as that breath noises may be produced with a more open and slightly more front place of articulation than realizations of schwa. We found positive correlations between acoustic and physiological parameters, suggesting that when speakers inhale faster, the resulting breath noises were more intense and produced more anterior in the mouth. Inspecting the entire spectrum of speech breath noises, we showed relatively flat spectra and several weak peaks. These peaks largely overlapped with resonances reported for inhalations produced with a central vocal tract configuration. We used 3D-printed vocal tract models representing four vowels and four fricatives to simulate in- and exhalations by reversing airflow direction. We found the direction to not have a general effect for all models, but only for those with high-tongue configurations, as opposed to those that were more open. Then, we compared inhalations produced with the schwa-model to human inhalations in an attempt to approach the vocal tract configuration in speech breathing. There were some similarities, however, several complexities of human speech breathing not captured in the models complicated comparisons. In two perception studies, we investigated how much information listeners could auditorily extract from breath noises. First, we tested categorizing different breath noises into six different types, based on airflow direction and airway usage, e.g. oral inhalation. Around two thirds of all answers were correct. Second, we investigated how well breath noises could be used to discriminate between speakers and to extract coarse information on speaker characteristics, such as age (old/young) and sex (female/male). We found that listeners were able to distinguish between two breath noises coming from the same or different speakers in around two thirds of all cases. Hearing one breath noise, classification of sex was successful in around 64%, while for age it was 50%, suggesting that sex was more perceivable than age in breath noises.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) – Projektnummer 418659027: "Pause-internal phonetic particles in speech communication

Discourse Intonation

This paper addresses the different notions of „discourse‟ that underlie various studies of „discourse prosody.‟ It describes the prosodic resources available to speakers to convey different kinds of discourse meaning. In so doing, I distinguish between discourse as structure –information structure and text structure, discourse as language in use – pragmatics and conversation, and discourse as a reflection of society – power and persuasion. In addressing the final aspect of discourse – its ability to manipulate and persuade, I recall the classical origins of rhetoric and revisit the all-important notion of „delivery‟

Elementary School L2 English Teachers’ Language Performance and Children’s Second Language Acquisition

This doctoral dissertation investigates the linguistic performance of German elementary school English teachers and how their second language (L2) English performance relates to their students' acquisition of English as a foreign language. The studies reflect the teachers' L2 language performance, give insights into the interrelationships of the complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) dimensions of L2 language production, and finally address how linguistic performance relates to the students' L2 development. Following a mixed-methods approach, the first study analyzed the language performance elicited in semi-structured qualitative interviews with eleven German elementary school English teachers based on CAF measures. The second study focuses on the students' language development of a sub-set of four of the interviewed teachers. The students (N = 132) were given picture pointing tasks of either receptive grammar, receptive vocabulary or both at two times during the fourth year of elementary school. The key finding was that the whole group’s mean grammar score significantly improved from time one to time two. The increase of the mean vocabulary score was not statistically significant. When the students were grouped with their respective teachers, comparisons exposed significant differences between some of the groups. The third study synthesizes the teachers’ CAF performance and the students’ development in receptive English grammar and vocabulary. A principal components analysis (PCA) first calculated the variability of the range of the measures for complexity, accuracy, and fluency and their contributions to each CAF dimension. Correlation analyses between the dimensions revealed several robust significant correlations for complexity, accuracy, and fluency as captured in breakdown fluency and speed fluency. Repair fluency and lexical diversity correlated with breakdown and speed fluency, but not with accuracy and complexity. Based on the teachers’ composite CAF scores calculated in the PCA and the students’ test scores, the relationships between the teachers’ language performances and their students’ L2 development were analyzed. Multiple regression analyses retained breakdown fluency, measured in the number and length of pauses as part of the fluency dimension, as the only dimension significantly predicting the students’ receptive grammar development. The results point to several conclusions: First, the significant correlations between complexity, accuracy, and fluency in terms of breakdown and speed fluency indicate that the dimensions did not come at the expense of one another in the L2 performance on the cross-sectional interview task used in this study. Second, the students’ significant improvement in receptive English grammar implies some positive development of elementary school L2 English as a whole. However, the high variability among the students’ scores indicates other factors being at play in the children’s L2 development in addition to the teachers’ performance investigated in this study. Third, breakdown fluency as a specific feature of the teachers’ spoken language performance may have a beneficial effect on the children’s receptive English grammar acquisition. This finding is in line with observations of pausing as an element of L2 teacher talk as well as a prosodic feature in child-directed speech in first language acquisition that potentially aids language learners in segmenting linguistic input. The findings propose that future research take into consideration specific features in the L2 input and examine them as possible factors in children’s L2 language acquisition. Der Anhang dieser Veröffentlichung steht ebenfalls als elektronische Publikation im Internet kostenfrei (Open Access) zur Verfügung unter: http://dx.doi.org/10.18442/08

Fillers in Spoken Language Understanding: Computational and Psycholinguistic Perspectives

Disfluencies (i.e. interruptions in the regular flow of speech), are ubiquitous to spoken discourse. Fillers ("uh", "um") are disfluencies that occur the most frequently compared to other kinds of disfluencies. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, there isn't a resource that brings together the research perspectives influencing Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) on these speech events. This aim of this article is to synthesise a breadth of perspectives in a holistic way; i.e. from considering underlying (psycho)linguistic theory, to their annotation and consideration in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and SLU systems, to lastly, their study from a generation standpoint. This article aims to present the perspectives in an approachable way to the SLU and Conversational AI community, and discuss moving forward, what we believe are the trends and challenges in each area.Comment: To appear in TAL Journa