14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Non-Linguistic Influences on Rates of Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech

Holly Branigan (1), Robin Lickley (2), David McKelvie (2)

(1) Human Communication Research Centre, University of Glasgow, UK
(2) Human Communication Research Centre, University of Edinburgh, UK

We investigate how non-linguistic factors influence rates of disfluency in spontaneous speech in a set of task-oriented dialogues (the HCRC Map Task Corpus). The factors we consider are: sex of the speaker; sex of the addressee; conversational role; ability to see the addressee; familiarity with the addressee; and practice at the task. Our analyses examined disfluency rate (the number of disfluencies per 100 intended words) and discard rate (the number of reparandum words per 100 intended words) in a series of within- and between-speaker comparisons. Our results suggest that, perhaps unsurprisingly, these non-linguistic factors do influence speaker fluency. However, their influences may manifest themselves through complex interactions with other factors, and in some cases may only be apparent for particular measures of disfluency or particular types of disfluency. The work has implications for both psychological and computational models of speech production and perception

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Branigan, Holly / Lickley, Robin / McKelvie, David (1999): "Non-linguistic influences on rates of disfluency in spontaneous speech", In ICPhS-14, 387-390.