Phonetic Consequences of Speech Disfluency

Abstract

Unlike read or laboratory speech, spontaneous speech contains high rates of disfluencies (e.g., repetitions, repairs, filled pauses). Such events reflect production problems frequently encountered in everyday conversation. Analyses of American English show that disfluency affects a variety of phonetic aspects of speech, including segment durations, intonation, voice quality, vowel quality, and coarticulation patterns. These effects provide clues about production processes, and can guide methods for disfluency processing in speech recognition applications.