Acoustic vowel quality of filler particles in German

Belz, Malte

doi:10.4119/lw2020-908

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…3 However, the acoustic signal of the filler particle gives evidence for articulatory and acoustic activity, so there is de facto no pause in the speech signal. Furthermore, the literature on the phonetic realization of filler particles reports language-, speaker-, and context-specific acoustic characteristics of fundamental frequency (Shriberg 1994;Shriberg and Lickley 1993), vowel formants (Belz 2020;de Boer et al 2022), and interactions with prosody (Belz 2021;Clark and Fox Tree 2002), corroborating the hypothesis of Gick et al (2004, p. 231) that filler particles "have targets of their own". Therefore, in a strict articulatory-acoustic phonetic sense, there is no pause (although a listener might nonetheless perceive one).…”

Section: Linguistic Category-or Descriptive Inadequacy-and the Term F...supporting

confidence: 69%

“…Though typically one to three prototypical filler particles per language are (phonologically) observed (e.g., Lickley 2015), there can still be substantial (phonetic) variation, which is why there is no a priori list of expected phonetic exponents given here. For example, for German, the forms [@ 5 E oe ø] and [@m 5m Em oem øm] (Batliner et al 1995;Belz 2020), which vary in vowel quality, as well as glottal forms (Belz 2017) are observed. In addition, up to this point, clicks are still potential candidates for filler particles.…”

Section: Characterization 1 (Signal) → Phonetic Exponentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Defining Filler Particles: A Phonetic Account of the Terminology, Form, and Grammatical Classification of “Filled Pauses”

Belz

2023

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The terms hesitation, planner, filler, and filled pause do not always refer to the same phonetic entities. This terminological conundrum is approached by investigating the observational, explanatory, and descriptive inadequacies of the terms in use. Concomitantly, the term filler particle is motivated and a definition is proposed that identifies its phonetic exponents and describes them within the linguistic category of particles. The definition of filler particles proposed here is grounded both theoretically and empirically and then applied to a corpus of spontaneous dialogues with 32 speakers of German, showing that in addition to the prototypical phonetic forms, there is a substantial amount of non-prototypical forms, i.e., 9.5%, comprising both glottal (e.g., [Ɂ]) and vocal forms (e.g., [ɛɸ], [j~ɛvə]). The grammatical classification and the results regarding the phonetic forms are discussed with respect to their theoretical relevance in filler particle research and corpus studies. The phonetic approach taken here further suggests a continuum of phonetic forms of filler particles, ranging from singleton segments to multi-syllabic entities.

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Section: Linguistic Category-or Descriptive Inadequacy-and the Term F...supporting

confidence: 69%

Section: Characterization 1 (Signal) → Phonetic Exponentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Defining Filler Particles: A Phonetic Account of the Terminology, Form, and Grammatical Classification of “Filled Pauses”

Belz

2023

Languages

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A Longitudinal Study of Speech Acoustics in Older French Females: Analysis of the Filler Particle euh across Utterance Positions

2021

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Aging in speech production is a multidimensional process. Biological, cognitive, social, and communicative factors can change over time, stay relatively stable, or may even compensate for each other. In this longitudinal work, we focus on stability and change at the laryngeal and supralaryngeal levels in the discourse particle euh produced by 10 older French-speaking females at two times, 10 years apart. Recognizing the multiple discourse roles of euh, we divided out occurrences according to utterance position. We quantified the frequency of euh, and evaluated acoustic changes in formants, fundamental frequency, and voice quality across time and utterance position. Results showed that euh frequency was stable with age. The only acoustic measure that revealed an age effect was harmonics-to-noise ratio, showing less noise at older ages. Other measures mostly varied with utterance position, sometimes in interaction with age. Some voice quality changes could reflect laryngeal adjustments that provide for airflow conservation utterance-finally. The data suggest that aging effects may be evident in some prosodic positions (e.g., utterance-final position), but not others (utterance-initial position). Thus, it is essential to consider the interactions among these factors in future work and not assume that vocal aging is evident throughout the signal.

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Acoustic vowel quality of filler particles in German

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Defining Filler Particles: A Phonetic Account of the Terminology, Form, and Grammatical Classification of “Filled Pauses”

Defining Filler Particles: A Phonetic Account of the Terminology, Form, and Grammatical Classification of “Filled Pauses”

A Longitudinal Study of Speech Acoustics in Older French Females: Analysis of the Filler Particle euh across Utterance Positions

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