14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


Repetition and its Phonetic Realizations: Investigating a Swedish Database of Spontaneous Computer-Directed Speech

Linda Bell, Joakim Gustafson

Centre for Speech Technology (CTT), Department of Speech, Music and Hearing, KTH, Stockholm

This paper is an investigation of repetitive utterances in a Swedish database of spontaneous computer-directed speech. A spoken dialogue system was installed in a public location in downtown Stockholm and spontaneous human-computer interactions with adults and children were recorded. Several acoustic and prosodic features such as duration, shifting of focus and hyperarticulation were examined to see whether repetitions could be distinguished from what the users first said to the system. The present study indicates that adults and children use partly different strategies as they attempt to resolve errors by means of repetition. As repetition occurs, duration is increased and words are often hyperarticulated or contrastively focused. These results could have implications for the development of future spoken dialogue systems with robust error handling.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Bell, Linda / Gustafson, Joakim (1999): "Repetition and its phonetic realizations: investigating a Swedish database of spontaneous computer-directed speech", In ICPhS-14, 1221-1224.