Juncture cues to disfluency

This paper describes properties of normal dis uent speech which help listeners to distinguish dis uent from uent strings of speech. It focusses on juncture phenomena in cases where there is no clear silent pause at the interruption point. Recent attempts to de ne acoustically identi able features of speech which can be seen as reliable indicators of dis uency have produced several suggestions. But studies of silent pause, (pre-)pausal lengthening, glottalisation and measurements of F0 have all failed to provide any reliable means of distinguishing uent from dis uent continuations. This paper introduces into the discussion a phonological feature of speech which has been overlooked in previous work and which could prove to be a reliable indicator of dis uency, especially in mid-clause dis uencies where no pause is present at the interruption. In normal uent continuous speech, words are not usually separated by silent pause into discrete units, but have their boundaries obscured or linked by processes like assimilation, liaison, elision and so on. The hypothesis examined by the present study is that such juncture phenomena are blocked by dis uency. Evidence from perceptual experiments suggests that this phenomenon may be used by human listeners in early detection of dis uency.