Filled pauses as markers of discourse structure
Marc G. J. Swerts, Anne Wichmann, Robbert‐Jan Beun · 4th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1996) · 1996
This study aims to test quantitatively whether lled pauses (FPs) may highlight discourse structure.More specically, it is rst investigated whether FPs are more typical in the vicinity of major discourse boundaries.Secondly, the FPs are analyzed acoustically, to check whether those occurring at major discourse boundaries are segmentally and prosodically dierent from those at shallower breaks.Analyses of twelve spontaneous monologues (Dutch) show that phrases following major discourse boundaries more often contain FPs.Additionally, FPs after stronger breaks tend to occur phraseinitially, whereas the majority of the FPs after weak boundaries are in phrase-internal position.Also, acoustic observations reveal that FPs at major discourse boundaries are both segmentally and prosodically distinct.They also dier with respect to the distribution of neighbouring silent pauses.