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Segmental, prosodic and fluency features in phonetic learner corpora
Edited by Jürgen Trouvain, Frank Zimmerer, Bernd Möbius, Mária Gósy and Anne Bonneau
[International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 3:2] 2017
► pp. 149–174

Phonetic analysis of filled pauses based on a Hungarian-English learner corpus

| Hungarian Academy of Sciences
| Hungarian Academy of Sciences
| Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Filled pauses may reveal speech planning or execution problems to a greater extent in L2 spontaneous speech than in L1. The purpose of this study was to analyze the forms and position of all filled pauses, and the durations and the formants of vocalic filled pauses in English (L2) and in Hungarian (L1) spontaneous speech produced by 30 young learners with various L2 proficiency levels using data from our HunEng-D learner corpus. The findings showed that the forms of filled pauses were similar in both languages, irrespective of level of language proficiency. Results confirmed significantly longer vocalic filled pauses in basic and intermediate learners in their L2 relative to their more advanced peers. Formant values (as acoustic reflections of vowel quality) indicated very similar articulatory configurations for all vocalic filled pauses, irrespective of language and language proficiency.

Keywords: HunEng-D corpus, duration, acoustics of vocalic filled pauses, proficiency level
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1The HunEng-D learner database
    • 2.2Recording protocol
    • 2.3Recording conditions
    • 2.4Annotations
    • 2.5Participants of the present study
    • 2.6Measurements
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Forms and position of filled pauses
    • 3.2Duration of vocalic filled pauses
    • 3.3Formants of vocalic filled pauses
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Forms and position of filled pauses
    • 4.2Durations of vocalic filled pauses
    • 4.3Formants of vocalic filled pauses
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 4 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.3.2.03gos
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