ISCA Archive LW 2020
ISCA Archive LW 2020

Filled pauses and prolongations in Roman Italian task-oriented dialogue

Jessica Di Napoli

This paper presents work in progress on two markers of hesitation in Roman Italian task-oriented dialogue, namely filled pauses and prolongations. We investigate their form, relative frequency, and distributional characteristics in Italian. Initial results suggest that Italian speakers produce prolongations more frequently than filled pauses, and that the prototypical hesitant prolongation involves a word-final vowel.