Is It a Filler or a Pause? A Quantitative Analysis of Filled Pauses in Hebrew

Silber-Varod, Vered; Gósy, Mária; Lerner, Anat

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-87802-3_57

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 22 publications

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“…This finding contributes to an ongoing debate about whether the insertion of fillers into spontaneous speech is a conscious choice of the speaker, just as it is for meaningful words, or if their production is more similar to the insertion of pauses, which are often simply a by-product of production delays (Clark and Fox Tree, 2002; Tian et al, 2017; Silber-Varod et al, 2021). To our knowledge, this is the first study to look directly at the neural response to fillers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

“Um…, it’s really difficult to… um… speak fluently”: Neural tracking of spontaneous speech

Agmon

Jaeger

Tsarfaty

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Spontaneous real-life speech is imperfect in many ways. It contains disfluencies and ill-formed utterances that the brain needs to contend with in order to extract meaning out of speech. Here, we studied how the neural speech-tracking response is affected by three specific factors that are prevalent in spontaneous colloquial speech: (1) the presence of non-lexical fillers, (2) the need to detect syntactic boundaries in disfluent speech and (3) the effort involved in processing syntactically complex phrases. Neural activity (EEG) was recorded from individuals as they listened to an unscripted, spontaneous narrative, which was analyzed in a time-resolved fashion to identify fillers, detect syntactic boundaries and assess the syntactic complexity of different phrases. When considering these factors in the speech-tracking analysis, we found that it was affected by all of them. The most consistent effect, observed for all three factors, was modulation of a centro-frontal negative response that peaked around 350 ms, highly resembling the well-known N400 ERP response linked to various aspects of lexical access and semantic processing. This response was observed for lexical words but not for fillers, was larger for opening vs. closing words of a clause and was enhanced in response to high-complexity phrases. These findings broaden ongoing efforts to understand neural processing of speech under increasingly realistic conditions. They highlight the importance of considering the imperfect nature of real-life spoken language, linking past research on linguistically well-formed and meticulously controlled speech to the type of speech that the brain actually deals with on a daily basis.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

“Um…, it’s really difficult to… um… speak fluently”: Neural tracking of spontaneous speech

Agmon

Jaeger

Tsarfaty

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“Um…, It’s Really Difficult to… Um… Speak Fluently”: Neural Tracking of Spontaneous Speech

Agmon

Jaeger

Tsarfaty

et al. 2023

Neurobiology of Language

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Spontaneous real-life speech is imperfect in many ways. It contains disfluencies and ill-formed utterances and has a highly variable rate. When listening to spontaneous speech, the brain needs to contend with these features in order to extract the speaker’s meaning. Here, we studied how the neural response is affected by four specific factors that are prevalent in spontaneous colloquial speech: (1) the presence of fillers, (2) the need to detect syntactic boundaries in disfluent speech, and (3) variability in speech rate. Neural activity (EEG) was recorded from individuals as they listened to an unscripted, spontaneous narrative, which was analyzed in a time-resolved fashion to identify fillers and detect syntactic boundaries. When considering these factors in a speech-tracking analysis, which estimates a temporal response function (TRF) to describe the relationship between the stimulus and the neural response it generates, we found that the TRF was affected by all of them. This response was observed for lexical words but not for fillers, and it had an earlier onset for opening words vs. closing words of a clause and for clauses with slower speech rates. These findings broaden ongoing efforts to understand neural processing of speech under increasingly realistic conditions. They highlight the importance of considering the imperfect nature of real-life spoken language, linking past research on linguistically well-formed and meticulously controlled speech to the type of speech that the brain actually deals with on a daily basis.

show abstract

Is It a Filler or a Pause? A Quantitative Analysis of Filled Pauses in Hebrew

Cited by 2 publications

References 22 publications

“Um…, it’s really difficult to… um… speak fluently”: Neural tracking of spontaneous speech

“Um…, it’s really difficult to… um… speak fluently”: Neural tracking of spontaneous speech

“Um…, It’s Really Difficult to… Um… Speak Fluently”: Neural Tracking of Spontaneous Speech

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