Inter-Speech Clicks in an Interspeech Keynote

Abstract

Clicks are usually described as phoneme realisations in some African languages or as paralinguistic vocalisations, e.g. to signal disapproval or as sound imitation. A more recent discovery is that clicks are, presumably unintentionally, used as discourse markers indexing a new sequence in a conversation or before a word search. In this single-case study, we investigated more than 300 apical clicks of an experienced speaker during a keynote address at an Interspeech conference. The produced clicks occurred only in inter-speech intervals and were often combined with either hesitation particles like "uhm" or audible inhalation. Our observations suggest a link between click production and ingressive airflow as well as indicate that clicks are used as hesitation markers. The rather high frequency of clicks in the analysed sections from the 1-hour-talk shows that in larger discourse, the time between articulatory phases consists of more than silence, audible inhalation and typical hesitation particles. The rather large variation in the intensity and duration and particularly the number of bursts of the observed clicks indicates that this prosodic discourse marker seems to be a rather acoustically inconsistent phonetic category.

Synthesis after a couple PINTs: Investigating the Role of Pause-Internal Phonetic Particles in Speech Synthesis and Perception

“…Tongue clicks exhibit a number of functions such as: introducing a new sequence or topic, word search, maintaining a turn, backchanneling, stance marking, and repair [14,22]. The acoustic realizations of these tongue clicks are highly variable [23], which means that the tongue clicks the TTS engine rendered might behave differently from our intended function. The fact that tongue clicks did not improve certainty by signaling a successful word search affirms that the production and perception of different PINTs patterns might require more elaborate experimental design, such as in-context perceptual evaluations.…”

Distributional and Acoustic Characteristics of Filler Particles in German with Consideration of Forensic-Phonetic Aspects

“…A rate of 1.3 clicks per minute was reported for English dialogues in Ogden (2013); however, a high variation between speakers was observed. Trouvain and Malisz (2016) found a click rate of 6-12 per minute for one native English speaker who was regarded as a heavy clicker. However, Zellers (2022) found a rate ranging between 1-5.4 clicks per minute for twelve Swedish speakers.…”

“…Here, we consider tongue clicks as potential FPs (Belz 2023), as they frequently occur in pauses and their function as a hesitation device has been reported previously in Trouvain and Malisz (2016). We see a large variation between studies and individuals in the use of tongue clicks.…”

“…Less often described are glottal FPs and tongue clicks (however, see (Smith and Clark 1993)). We consider tongue clicks as potential FPs that can be used for self-repair (Li 2020) or when having trouble finding a word (Ogden 2020;Trouvain and Malisz 2016) as situations that are typical when using FPs.…”

Listener- Versus Speaker-Oriented Disfluencies in Autistic Adults: Insights From Wearable Eye-Tracking and Skin Conductance Within a Live Face-to-Face Paradigm

“…Studies of disfluency in autism mostly focused on "fillers," also called "filled pauses." This category combines "hesitation markers" (e.g., uh, um) and "discourse markers" (e.g., well, so, you know) and even "clicks" 1 (Pinto & Vigil, 2020;Trouvain & Malisz, 2016). Because they are thought to be structuring and helpful to the addressee (giving cues for interpretation), discourse markers can be classified as listener-oriented disfluencies (e.g., Maschler & Schiffrin, 2015).…”