Prosodic parallelism as a cue to repetition disfluency
Repetition disfluencies are among the most frequent type of disfluency in conversational speech, accounting for over 20% of disfluencies, yet they do not generally lead to comprehension errors for human listeners. We propose that parallel prosodic features in the REP and ALT intervals of the repetition disfluency provide strong perceptual cues that signal the repetition to the listener. We report results from a transcription analysis of repetition disfluencies that classifies disfluent regions on the basis of prosodic factors, and preliminary evidence from F0 analysis to support our finding of prosodic parallelism. 1. Acoustic-prosodic correlates of disfluency Disfluency occurs in spontaneous speech at a rate of about one every 10-20 words, or 6% per word count [17], yet this interruption of fluent speech does not generally lead to comprehension errors for human listeners. Recent research has shown that important cues to disfluency can be found in the syntactic and semantic structures conveyed by the word sequence, and in the phonological and phonetic structures signaled by acoustic features local to the disfluency interval. These cues identify the components of the disfluent regionthe reparandum (REP), edit phrase (EDIT), and alteration (ALT)--- and their junctures. Work on automatic disfluency detection has shown that the most successful approach combines both lexical and acoustic features, with explicit models of the lexical-syntactic and prosodic features that pattern systematically with disfluent intervals [1,6].