Self Addressed Questions and Filled Pauses: A Cross-linguistic Investigation

There is an ongoing debate whether phenomena of disfluency (such as filled pauses) are produced communicatively. Clark and Fox Tree (Cognition 84(1):73–111, 2002) propose that filled pauses are words, and that different forms signal different lengths of delay. This paper evaluates this Filler-As-Words hypothesis by analyzing the distribution of self-addressed-questions or SAQs (such as “what’s the word”) in relation to filled pauses. We found that SAQs address different problems in different languages (most frequently about memory-retrieval in English and Chinese, and about appropriateness in Japanese). In relation to filled pauses, British but not American English uses “um” to signal a more severe problem than “uh”. Chinese uses different filled pauses to signal the syntactic category of the problem constituent. Japanese uses different filled pauses to signal levels of interaction with the interlocuter. Overall, our data supports the Filler-As-Words hypothesis that filled pauses are used communicatively. However, the dimensions of its meanings vary across languages and dialects.

[1]  W. Francis,et al.  The London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English: Description and Research , 1992 .

[2]  S. Rochester.  The significance of pauses in spontaneous speech , 1973, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[3]  J. E. Tree.  The Effects of False Starts and Repetitions on the Processing of Subsequent Words in Spontaneous Speech , 1995 .

[4]  Catherine T. Best,et al.  Null Subject Versus Null Object: Some Evidence From the Acquisition of , 1992 .

[5]  Mihoko M. Zushi,et al.  Null arguments: the case of Japanese and Romance , 2003 .

[6]  A W Siegman,et al.  Ambiguity and verbal fluency in the TAT. , 1966, Journal of consulting psychology.

[7]  F. Goldman-Eisler.  Psycholinguistics: Experiments in spontaneous speech , 1968 .

[8]  Kyung-Eun Yoon,et al.  A cross-linguistic exploration of demonstratives in interaction , 2010 .

[9]  D. O’connell,et al.  Uh and Um Revisited: Are They Interjections for Signaling Delay? , 2005, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[10]  Jennifer E. Arnold,et al.  Disfluencies Signal Theee, Um, New Information , 2003, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[11]  Keikichi Hirose,et al.  Clause types and filed pauses in Japanese spontaneous monologues , 2004, INTERSPEECH.

[12]  M. Pell,et al.  The feeling of another's knowing: How "mixed messages" in speech are reconciled. , 2016, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[13]  D. S. Boomer.  Hesitation and Grammatical Encoding , 1965, Language and speech.

[14]  Jonathan Ginzburg,et al.  Disfluencies as intra-utterance dialogue moves , 2014 .

[15]  M. S. Miron,et al.  A cross-linguistic investigation of phonetic symbolism. , 1961, Journal of abnormal and social psychology.

[16]  C. Osgood,et al.  Hesitation Phenomena in Spontaneous English Speech , 1959 .

[17]  Keikichi Hirose,et al.  Filled pauses as cues to the complexity of upcoming phrases for native and non-native listeners , 2008, Speech Commun..

[18]  A. W. Siegman,et al.  Anxiety and depression in speech. , 1970, Journal of consulting and clinical psychology.

[19]  Geoffrey Leech,et al.  100 Million Words of English:The British National Corpus (BNC) , 1992 .

[20]  Barbara A. Fox,et al.  Interaction and grammar: Resources and repair: a cross-linguistic study of syntax and repair , 1996 .

[21]  S. Brennan,et al.  THE FEELING OF ANOTHER'S KNOWING : PROSODY AND FILLED PAUSES AS CUES TO LISTENERS ABOUT THE METACOGNITIVE STATES OF SPEAKERS , 1995 .

[22]  Xiang-ling Dai,et al.  Chinese Morphology and its Interface with the Syntax , 1992 .

[23]  Keikichi Hirose,et al.  Factors affecting speakers² choice of fillers in Japanese presentations , 2006, INTERSPEECH.

[24]  Toshiyuki Sadanobu,et al.  The monitoring devices of mental operations in discourse , 1995 .

[25]  Keikichi Hirose,et al.  Filled pauses as cues to the complexity of following phrases , 2005, INTERSPEECH.

[26]  Keikichi Hirose,et al.  Factors Affecting Speakers ' Choice of , 2006 .

[27]  M. Liberman,et al.  Variation and change in the use of hesitation markers in Germanic languages , 2016 .

[28]  J. E. Tree.  Listeners' uses of um and uh in speech comprehension. , 2001 .

[29]  Bernard Bloch,et al.  Studies in Colloquial Japanese I Inflection , 1946 .

[30]  Elisabeth Ahlsén,et al.  Multimodality in own communication management , 2006 .

[31]  Adnan Al Mubaideen.  The Psychological Reality of Phrase Structure Rules , 2015 .

[32]  Fiona G. Phelps,et al.  Gaze aversion: A response to cognitive or social difficulty? , 2005, Memory & cognition.

[33]  W. Levelt,et al.  Monitoring and self-repair in speech , 1983, Cognition.

[34]  H. H. Clark,et al.  Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking , 2002, Cognition.

[35]  Huei-ling Lai,et al.  The NCCU Corpus of Spoken Chinese: Mandarin, Hakka, and Southern Min , 2008 .

[36]  Duane G. Watson,et al.  The disfluent discourse: Effects of filled pauses on recall. , 2011, Journal of memory and language.

[37]  N. Iwasaki.  Filling social space with fillers: gains in social dimension after studying abroad , 2011 .

[38]  Barbara A. Fox,et al.  A cross-linguistic study of self-repair: Evidence from English, German, and Hebrew , 2010 .

[39]  Yuan Zhao,et al.  A preliminary study of Mandarin filled pauses , 2005, DiSS.

[40]  James P. Blevins,et al.  English Inflection and Derivation , 2008 .

[41]  Hiromu Sakai,et al.  Priority Information Used for the Processing of Japanese Sentences: Thematic Roles, Case Particles or Grammatical Functions? , 2005, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[42]  K. Maekawa.  CORPUS OF SPONTANEOUS JAPANESE : ITS DESIGN AND EVALUATION , 2003 .

[43]  J. Lake,et al.  Listener vs. speaker-oriented aspects of speech: Studying the disfluencies of individuals with autism spectrum disorders , 2011, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[44]  Talmy Givón,et al.  On the So-Called Sov Word Order in Mandarin Chinese: A Quantified Text Study and Its Implications , 1985 .

[45]  John J. Godfrey,et al.  SWITCHBOARD: telephone speech corpus for research and development , 1992, [Proceedings] ICASSP-92: 1992 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[46]  N. F. Johnson.  The psychological reality of phrase-structure rules , 1965 .

[47]  Tatsuya Kawahara,et al.  Prosodic analysis of fillers and self-repair in Japanese speech , 1998, ICSLP.

[48]  J. Blevins.  English Inflection and Derivation 507 22 English Inflection and Derivation , 2006 .

[49]  Barbara A. Fox,et al.  Conversation Analysis: A cross-linguistic investigation of the site of initiation in same-turn self-repair , 2009 .

[50]  Robin J. Lickley,et al.  On not recognizing disfluencies in dialogue , 1996, Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96.