An Application of Comparative Corpora of Interactional Data - Toward the Sound Profiles of Sites of Initiation in French and Mandarin Recycling Repair

This study examines the sound profiles of sites of initiation in French and Mandarin recycling repair (also disfluent repetitions). 150 examples of disfluent repetitions were extracted from comparative speech corpora of naturally occurred, face-to-face Mandarin and French interaction. By the approach of interactional prosody plus impressionistic judgments, each instance of recycling repair was annotated manually for its prosodic realization, including relative pitch height and duration between the R1/R2 of the repair, as well as silence and other sound cues for initiating the repair. Through comparing the results of acoustic measurements, it is suggested that interlocutors of the two languages may orient to different methods of initiating the repair in spontaneous interaction in that, French speakers tend to incorporate lengthening at the end of R1 plus optional filled pauses to initiate the repair, while Mandarin speakers employ quick cut-offs for repair initiation, followed by immediate