Factors influencing ratios of filled pauses at clause boundaries in Japanese
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2006/01/0057/000057Abstract
Speech disfluencies have been studied as clues to human speech production mechanisms. Major constituents are assumed to be principal units of planning and disflu-encies are claimed to occur when speakers have some trouble in planning such units. We tested two hypotheses about the probability of disfluencies by examining the ratios of filled pauses (fillers) at sentence and clause boundaries: 1) the deeper the boundary, the higher the ratio of filled pauses (the boundary hypothesis); 2) the more complex the upcoming constituent, the higher the ratio of filled pauses (the complexity hypothesis). The both hypotheses were supported by filler ratios at clause boundaries, but not by those at sentence boundaries. The results are discussed in light of speech production models.
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Copyright (c) 2006 Michiko Watanabe (Author)

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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.