ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014

Prosody, voice assimilation, and conversational fillers

Štefan Beňuš, Marián Trnka

Conversational fillers (CFs), commonly transcribed as uh, um, or er, typically start with a schwa-like vowel, and signal multiple social, interactive, meta-cognitive, and pragmatic functions. They also co-occur with prosodic boundaries, increase saliency of inter-word disjunctures, and participate thus in coding the prosodic structure. Contrary to these functions, CFs are assumed not to participate in the phonological system of a language. This paper uses two types of Slovak conversational speech corpora for investigating the the prosodic and phonological behavior of CFs. In Slovak, the vowel inventory does not include a schwa, and word-final obstruents undergo voice assimilation that is triggered by word-initial vowels but interacts with the strength of the prosodic boundary between the two words. Our data show the propensity of CFs to neutralize word-final voicing, and function thus as prosodic breaks, but also non- negligible number of cases of CFs triggering voicing of word-final obstruents, supporting their relevance for cognitive phonology.