Analysis of disfluencies in a corpus of university lectures

This paper analyzes the prosodic properties of disfluencies and of their contexts in a corpus of university lectures. Results show that there is a general tendency to repair fluency by means of prosodic contrast marking strategies (pitch and energy increase), regardless of the specific disfluency type, but still there are degrees in the contrast made by certain types. As for tempo patterns, the region to repair is longer than the repair itself, and there is a strong trend manifested in lengthy silences between those regions. However, the monitoring of the lengthiness effect varies considerable amongst speakers and disfluency types.