ISCA Archive Interspeech 2022
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2022

Hesitations in Urdu/Hindi: Distribution and Properties of Fillers & Silences

Farhat Jabeen, Simon Betz

This research presents an analysis of hesitations in Urdu/Hindi semi-spontaneous dialogues. We annotated and analyzed twenty-five minutes of speech to investigate the frequency of hesitations and the properties of fillers as well as the formants in fillers' vocalic intervals to determine their vowel quality. We found that our participants used fillers, silences, and prolongations with varying frequency. Moreover, Urdu/Hindi speakers used the fillers with only vocalic intervals (uh) more frequently than the ones with vocalic intervals followed by nasals (um). The regression analysis showed that the um_type fillers were significantly longer and followed by longer silences as compared with the uh_type fillers. Furthermore, the um_types were placed more frequently at the turn medial position, whereas the uh_type fillers occurred at turn initial or medial position with similar frequency. The analysis of their formants showed that the vocalic intervals used in the fillers differed from other vowels in the inventory of Urdu/Hindi. Our data confirms the existing claim that uh and um are two distinct types of fillers. Our results are relevant for developing speech synthesis systems for Urdu/Hindi as well as improving the existing models seeking to incorporate hesitations and fillers in a realistic manner.