Contrastive analysis of English and Japanese disfluencies using parallel spontaneous speech corpora of the two languages

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24520494
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Japanese linguistics
• Research Institution: National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: WATANABE Michiko 大学共同利用機関法人人間文化研究機構国立国語研究所, コーパス開発センター, プロジェクト非常勤研究員 (60470027)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 非流暢性 / 言い淀み / ポーズ / フィラー / 発話生成モデル

Outline of Final Research Achievements

I investigated the relationship between the use of silent and filled pauses and the speaker’s cognitive load of speech production at deep syntactic boundaries. More specifically, I examined the effects of boundary depth and the subsequent clause length on the durations of silent and filled pauses at the boundaries, using “The Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese”. The results revealed that silent pause duration increased with the boundary depth and the subsequent clause length, but not filled pause duration. On the other hand, filled pause rate increased with preceding silent pause durations. These results indicate that speaker’s cognitive load of speech production affects silent pause durations, and that long silent pauses trigger additional filled pauses.

Free Research Field

音声科学