To ‘errrr’ is human: ecology and acoustics of speech disfluencies

TLDR: In this article, two broad claims are made, based on analyses of disuencies in different corpora of spontaneous American English speech, namely, ecology claim and acoustic claim, which is supported by evidence from task effects, location analyses, speaker effects and sociolinguistic effects.

Abstract: Unlike read or laboratory speech, spontaneous speech contains high rates of disuencies (e.g. repetitions, repairs, ®lled pauses, false starts). This paper aims to promotedisuency awareness' especially in the ®eld of phonetics ± which has much to offer in the way of increasing our understanding of these phenomena. Two broad claims are made, based on analyses of disuencies in different corpora of spontaneous American English speech. First, an Ecology Claim suggests that disuencies are related to aspects of the speaking environments in which they arise. The claim is supported by evidence from task effects, location analyses, speaker effects and sociolinguistic effects. Second, an Acoustics Claim argues that disuency has consequences for phonetic and prosodic aspects of speech that are not represented in the speech patterns of laboratory speech. Such effects include modi®cations in segment durations, intonation, voice quality, vowel quality and coarticulation patterns. The ecological and acoustic evidence provide insights about human language production in real-world contexts. Such evidence can also guide methods for the processing of spontaneous speech in automatic speech recognition applications.