A linguistic analysis of repair signals in co-operative spoken dialogues

This paper presents results of a corpus-based analysis of speech repairs, investigating repair signals which mark the existence of possible repairs. Dividing speech repairs into three parts: erroneous part, editing term and correction, this paper provides empirical evidence which supports the notion that speech repairs are produced in a rather regular syntactic pattern. Phrases seem to play a particular role in the production of speech repairs, as phrasal boundaries frequently correspond to boundaries within or around repairs. Related acoustic-prosodic features highlighting the internal structure of repairs including F0, duration and tonal patterns are also examined and discussed with respect to speci c syntactic patterns.