The influence of articulation rate, and the disfluency of others, on one's own speech

Disfluencies are a regular feature of spontaneous speech, and much has been learnt about the effects of various linguistic factors on their production. Speech usually occurs within dialogue, yet little is known about the influence of an interlocutor’s speech on a speaker’s own fluency. It has been shown that speakers tend to align on various levels, converging, for example, on lexical, and syntactic levels. But we know little about convergence in rate of speech or disfluency. Little is also known about the effects of speech rate on fluency in a speaker’s own speech. In this paper, we examine these effects through analysis of speech rate, hesitation and error correction in a corpus of task-oriented dialogues (the HCRC Map Task Corpus). Our findings demonstrate that different types of disfluencies can be influenced in different ways by speech rate. Furthermore, the probability of an interlocutor being disfluent appears to affect the speaker’s own likelihood, raising the possibility that interlocutors may “align” on disfluent, as well as fluent, speech.