ISCA Archive DiSS 2001
ISCA Archive DiSS 2001

Interruption glottalization in German spontaneous speech

Klaus J. Kohler, Benno Peters, Thomas Wesener

This paper analyzes the occurrence of phonetic interruption cues at points of syntactic irregularities (false starts and truncations) in a large annotated corpus of German dialogues and compares interruption glottalization with laryngealization in terminal low phrase-final prosodies. Glottalization (including glottal stop) predominantly marks word fragments, whereas non-verbal insertions, e.g. breathing, tend to be word-external interruption cues. Laryngealization (excluding glottal stop) predominantly signals terminal phrase boundaries in turn-final positions. Individual speakers differ a great deal as to the distribution of these phenomena.