Disfluency patterns in dialogue processing

Spontaneous speech abounds with disfluencies such as filled pauses, repairs, repetitions, false start and prolongations, all of which are significant but easily overlooked features of speech communication. Based on the comparable corpora of English and Japanese dialogues, we argue that disfluency features can have a positive effect on turn-taking issues and the establishment of common referring expressions in dialogue processing. We examined the occurrence of ten types of filled pauses in Japanese and investigated how they interact with discourse entities and the sharing of common ground. The results indicate that two patterns of disfluency features contribute to on-line speech planning of the participants and their four functions serve to construct the collaborative process of speech communication.

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