FILLED PAUSES AND LENGTHENING IN SPANISH: A PRELIMINARY STUDY

Abstract

Hesitations in spontaneous speech – filled pauses and lengthenings – have been approached from different perspectives, but their acoustic characteristics in Spanish have not yet been systematically analyzed. The aim of this preliminary study is to characterize hesitations that are used in spontaneous speech with different discourse functions. The corpus consisted of six spontaneous conversations between 2 participants, with a duration of about 30 minutes each, and 30 spontaneous fragments of a minute of duration corresponding to three sess ions recorded by 10 speakers. In the conversations, participants interacted with each other, whereas in the spontaneous fragments, the speaker knew that he would not be interrupted. The acoustic analysis has been complemented with a perceptual study in whi ch the listeners assessed the naturalness and the spontaneity of the same fragments presented with or without lengthening and with or without filled pauses. First of all, results show that the filled pause realized as [e ? ] is the most frequent one in Spani sh. There are no significant differences between the duration of lengthenings and the duration of filled pauses; however, the range of temporal values should be taken into account in the characterization of hesitations. Results also reveal that if the spea ker knows that he will not be interrupted, the number of hesitation phenomena increases. Fragments with and without hesitations are perceived as having the same degree of naturalness, but not the same level of spontaneity. Finally, it is interesting to not e that in spontaneous speech lengthenings might be perceived as empty pauses.