The structure of repetition strings in the Switchboard corpus

An investigation of reduction in the ten most frequent English function words in Switchboard, to be presented at ICSLP’98, found that repetition or following silence or filled pause, which were taken as symptoms of planning problems, were strongly associated with longer durations and lack of reduction, extending earlier results for the definite article [J. E. Foxtree and H. H. Clark, Cog. 62, 151–167 (1997)]. As a followup to this study, the structure of unplanned repetition strings is examined more closely. The study is based on an analysis of the lexical transcriptions of the repetitions of words and short phrases from over 100 h of recorded conversations from the Switchboard corpus. Detailed information about the phonetic form and contexts of repetitions a retaken from a phonetically transcribed sample of 4 h of conversation [S. Greenberg et al., ICSLP 96 Proc. (1996)]. Repetitions are overwhelmingly unplanned; are overwhelmingly function words; and are mostly single repetitions of words, although comp...