Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-21T23:51:20.175Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Hesitation Markers in English, German, and Dutch

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2007

Esther de Leeuw
Esther de Leeuw
Affiliation:
Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study reports on a number of highly significant differences found between English, German, and Dutch hesitation markers. English and German native speakers used significantly more vocalic-nasal hesitation markers than Dutch native speakers, who used predominantly vocalic hesitation markers. English hesitation markers occurred most frequently when preceded by silence and followed by a lexical item, or when surrounded by silence. German and Dutch hesitation markers occurred most frequently surrounded by lexical items. In Dutch, vocalic-nasal hesitation markers dominated only when surrounded by silence. Vocalic-nasal hesitation markers dominated in all positions in English and German, although in the former language this was more salient than in the latter. Nasal hesitation markers were used significantly more frequently in German than in English or Dutch. In addition to overall language trends, speaker-specific differences, especially within German and Dutch, were observed. These results raise questions in terms of the symptom versus signal hypotheses regarding the function of hesitation markers.I am indebted to Angelika Braun and Jens-Peter Köster for their supervision at the University of Trier. I am also thankful to Monika Schmid and Wim Peeters in the Netherlands and to Eva Gossner in England for their organizational help. Finally, I am very grateful to the participants, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. All inadequacies in this article remain my responsibility.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 85 - 114
Copyright
© 2007 Society for Germanic Linguistics

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baldwin John, and Peter French 1990. Forensic phonetics. London: Pinter.
Blaauw Eleonora 1995. On the perceptual classification of spontaneous and read speech. Utrecht: LED.
Bortfeld Heather, Silvia D. Leon, Jonathan E. Bloom, Michael F. Schober, and Susan E. Brennan 2001. Disfluency rates in conversation: Effects of age, relationship, topic, role, and gender. Language and Speech 44.123–147.Google Scholar
Clark Herbert H., and Jean E. Fox Tree 2002. Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition 84.73–111.Google Scholar
Christenfeld Nicholas 1994. Options and ums. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 13.192–199.Google Scholar
Delattre Pierre 1965. Comparing the phonetic features of English, French, German, and Spanish. Heidelberg: Julius Groos Verlag.
Dellwo Volker, and Petra Wagner 2003. Relations between language rhythm and speech rate. Proceedings of the fifteenth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 471–474. Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Donzel Monique E. van, and Florien J. Koopmans-van Beinum 1996. Pausing strategies in discourse in Dutch. Proceedings of the fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, vol. 2, 1029–1032. Philadelphia, PA: IEEE Press.
Foulkes Paul, Gareth Carrol, and Samantha Hughes 2003. Sociolinguistic and acoustic variability in filled pauses. Paper presented at the annual Conference of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics. Vienna.
Fox Tree Jean E. 1993. Comprehension after speech disfluencies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University.
Fox Tree Jean E. 2001. Listener's uses of um and uh in speech comprehension. Memory and Cognition 29.320–326.Google Scholar
Fox Tree Jean E. 2002. Interpreting pauses and ums at turn-exchanges. Discourse Processes 34.37–55.Google Scholar
Goldman-Eisler Frieda 1968. Psycholinguistics: Experiments in spontaneous speech. London: Academic Press.
Künzel Hermann J. 1987. Sprechererkennung—;Grundzüge forensischer Sprachverarbeitung. Heidelberg: Kriminalistik Verlag.
Künzel Hermann J., Angelika Braun, and Ulrich Eysholdt 1992. Einfluss von Alkohol auf Stimme und Sprache. Heidelberg: Kriminalistik Verlag.
Künzel Hermann J. 1997. Some general phonetic and forensic aspects of speaking tempo. Forensic Linguistics 4.48–83.Google Scholar
Laver John 1994. Principles of phonetics. (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levelt Willem J. M. 1983. Monitoring and self-repair in speech. Cognition 14.41–104.Google Scholar
Lickley Robin J. 1994. Detecting disfluency in spontaneous speech. Doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh.
Maclay Howard, and Charles E. Osgood 1959. Hesitation phenomena in spontaneous English speech. Word 15.19–44.Google Scholar
O'Connell Daniel C., and Sabine Kowal 2005. Uh and um revisited: Are they interjections for signaling delay? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 34.555–576.Google Scholar
Pfitzinger Hartmut R. 1998. Local speech rate as a combination of syllable and phone rate. Proceedings of the fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, ed. by Robert H. Mannell and Jordi Robert-Ribes, 1087–1090. Sydney: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association, Incorporated (ASSTA).
Pfitzinger Hartmut R. 2001. Phonetische Analyse der Sprechgeschwindigkeit. Forschungsberichte des Instituts für Phonetik und Sprachliche Kommunikation der Universität München 38.117–264.Google Scholar
Reynolds Allan, and Allan Paivio 1968. Cognitive and emotional determinants of speech. Canadian Journal of Psychology 22.164–175.Google Scholar
Rochester Sherry R. 1973. The significance of pauses in spontaneous speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 2.51–81.Google Scholar
Schachter Stanley, Nicholas Christenfeld, Bernard Ravina, and Frances Bilous 1991. Speech disfluency and the structure of knowledge. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60.362–367.Google Scholar
Shriberg Elizabeth 1994. Preliminaries to a theory of speech disfluencies. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
Shriberg Elizabeth 2001. To “err” is human: Ecology and acoustics of speech disfluencies. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 31.153–169.Google Scholar
Siegman Aron Wolfe, and Benjamin Pope 1966. Ambiguity and verbal fluency in the TAT. Journal of Consulting Psychology 30.239–245.Google Scholar
Swerts Marc, Anne Wichmann, and Robbert-Jan Beun 1996. Filled pauses as markers of discourse structure. Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, vol. 2, 1033–1036. Philadelphia: IEEE Press.
Tauroza Steve, and Desmond Allison 1990. Speech rates in British English. Applied Linguistics 11.90–105.Google Scholar
Verhoeven Jo, Guy De Pauw, and Hanne Kloots 2004. Speech rate in a pluricentric language: A comparison between Dutch in Belgium and the Netherlands. Language and Speech 47.297–308.Google Scholar