ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1995
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1995

Linguistic and acoustic characteristics of pause intervals in spontaneous speech

Nancy A. Daly-Kelly

This paper describes linguistic and acoustic characteristics of common disfluencies found in spontaneous speech taken from human/machine dialogues. A new linguistic unit, the pause interval, consisting of hesitated speech, silence and filled pauses, is proposed. Syntactic and acoustic analyses of spontaneous speech support the notion of pause intervals, and their constituents are identifiable with high accuracy in classification experiments.