Speech in everyday conversations is riddled with discourse markers (DMs), such as well, you know, and like. However, many lab-based studies of speech comprehension, DMs are typically absent from the carefully articulated highly controlled stimuli. As such, little known about how these influence online word recognition. The present study specifically investigated processing DM like it influences...

Automatic extraction of key sentences from academic presentation speeches is addressed. The method makes use of the characteristic expressions used in initial utterances of sections, which are defined as discourse markers and derived in a totally unsupervised manner based on word statistics. The statistics of the discourse markers are then used to define the importance of the sentences. It is a...

With advances in robotics, robots can give advice and help using natural language. The field of HRI, however, has not yet developed a communication strategy for giving advice effectively. Drawing on literature in politeness and informal speech, we propose options for a robot’s help-giving speech— using hedges or discourse markers, both of which can mitigate the commanding tone implied in direct...

This study explores whether discourse markers play a role in L2 listening comprehension and whether software programs make a difference in L2 listening comprehension. Two groups of approximately 25 freshman students listened to two versions of three different talks with and without higher order discourse markers. The talks were delivered by a native speaker, a non-native speaker and by a softwa...

This paper examines an understudied area of pragmatic research, namely, the sequencing of Discourse Markers (DMs). Looking only at the sequencing of Contrastive Discourse Markers (CDMs), thereby excluding both Elaborative and Inferential Discourse Markers, it is shown that only “but” may occur as the first with all of the other CDMs, e.g., “But, on the other hand...,” with “yet” occurring first...

Discourse particles and discourse markers (henceforth DMs) are intriguing objects of study, as they promise the researcher ready access to the very fabric of talk-inprogress. They can occur as lexical equivalents or complements of more elusive gestural or intonational cues that subtly guide and modulate the participants’ understanding, or they can saliently signal relations between utterances o...