What makes a good pause? Investigating the turn-holding effects of fillers
2023 (English)In: Proceedings 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Prague: International Phonetic Association , 2023, p. 3512-3516, article id 828Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Filled pauses (or fillers), such as uh and um, are frequent in spontaneous speech and can serve as a turn-holding cue for the listener, indicating that the current speaker is not done yet. In this paper, we use the recently proposed Voice Activity Projection (VAP) model, which is a deep learning model trained to predict the dynamics of conversation, to analyse the effects of filled pauses on the expected turn-hold probability. The results show that, while filled pauses do indeed have a turn-holding effect, it is perhaps not as strong as could be expected, probably due to the redundancy of other cues. We also find that the prosodic properties and position of the filler has a significant effect on the turn-hold probability. However, contrary to what has been suggested in previous work, there is no difference between uh and um in this regard.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Prague: International Phonetic Association , 2023. p. 3512-3516, article id 828
Series
ICPhS Proceedings, ISSN 2412-0669
Keywords [en]
Hesitation, fillers, turn-taking, spoken dialog, computational modelling
National Category
Natural Language Processing
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-341383OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-341383DiVA, id: diva2:1821229
Conference
20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS). August 7-11 2023, Prague, Czech Republic
Projects
tmh_turntaking
Note
Part of ISBN 978-80-908 114-2-3
QC 20241028
2023-12-192023-12-192025-02-07Bibliographically approved