A CUE-BASED APPROACH TO PROSODIC DISFLUENCY ANNOTATION

This paper elaborates a proposal for labelling prosodic disfluencies in American English, in conjunction with the ToBI framework for prosodic labelling. Incorporating disfluency annotation ideas developed for other languages, and for stuttered speech, the proposal introduces explicit disfluencyrelated labels into the Break Index tier, providing a more fine-grained categorization of the prosodic disfluency type than established ToBI disfluency labels. In addition, it explicitly labels 'speech errors' (e.g. word and sound sequencing errors) even when not disfluent, enabling separate study of these phenomena, and of their interaction. The paper further explores data labelled using this system by two independent labellers (recordings of spontaneous speech by 5 female speakers of Mainstream American English). The relative frequency of specific disfluency types, alone or in combination with others, reflects a high degree of diversity. Differences in disfluency patterns used by individual speakers are discussed.

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